DPC Latency on Mac

[grapii]

Hi All,

I've just been asked a question which I know nothing about and was wondering if anyone here can help.

I have a friend who is a DJ, and uses his Dell Windows laptop on his gigs, think he stores his music collection on it, as well as controlling the lights and lasers. Anyway he explained to me that he needs to get his DPC latency down to below 100ms, which apparently is extremely difficult to do on Windows OS, as it's not a "real time" operating system.

What is the situation with Macs? is there such a thing as DPC? and what would be the latency, on say, a 17" core i7 MBP?

Thanks, I know it's a strange one, but thought I'd ask the experts here.

 

[Astral Buddy]

I am also quite interested in knowing about the DPC situation with MBP's. I've had a lot of troubles with this on Windows systems, but I can't find any reports of DPC spikes on Macs, so I'm thinking of getting a MBP 13" (looking forward to tomorrows apparent revelation). Also I can't find any DPC checker tools for mac.

Does anyone know?

 

[larkost]

From a trivial amount of searching I already know that DPC is a Windows-only term. Since that particular way of working with drivers only exists on Windows, it is meaningless on MacOS.

What you really want for audio applications is to keep the latency down. MacOS has always been a strong platform for audio because they keep some real-time features around for things like this. Note, MacOS X is not a true real-time OS (there is no hard guarantee of latency and processor slices), but only has a few features from that set.

You need to actually try out your workflow on MacOS, and prove that it works for what you need it to. There is no single metric that is going to work like that.