[analog31]

Ah, that's interesting. I'm using a USB audio interface. It claims to be ASIO compatible. Oddly enough I tried the same interface in different computers, and have tried other computers, but haven't dug much further than that. I've also tried all of this on a decent Ubuntu box, and I've now got it running on a Raspberry Pi 3 since the overall latency has been more less the same in all cases.

We're all analog musicians playing alcohol powered instruments. ;-) Some of us are techies, others not. While I'm a techie, that side of my life has always been somewhat separate from the musical side, so I haven't paid that much attention to the digital technology until the pandemic came along. But I'm happy to learn, especially if something simple can make it work better.

[colossal]

You need to switch the drivers from WDM to ASIO. Most DAWs have this as an explicit choice with WDM as the default.

[adzm]

I think WASAPI has comparable latency to ASIO drivers. I can get around 20-30ms latency with WASAPI though ASIO takes me down to 10-15. Granted I'm using a dedicated USB audio interface though.

[namibj]

You should be able to easily sustain below 5ms buffer size, and RT_PREEMPT Linux has no problems keeping a few hundred microseconds of buffer filled (a suitable PCIe soundcard should easily make 100us buffer level reliable; that's 9.6 samples at 96kHz sample rate).

Yes, sub-ms latency is hard. But the infrastructure exists.