Another use is rendering virtual instruments with low latency, so you can play with a keyboard and render sounds live. Built in sound chips usually have unacceptable levels of latency, even with custom drivers.
It's been a while since I broke out & tuned JACK latency, but i think 2 samples of 3ms worked fine on most devices I'd tried, even without basics like a preemptible kernel, on boring old ancient intel chipsets. I'd expect most apps have no trouble getting under 16ms on basically any x86 hardware.
I'd be shocked to find that the majority of these aftermarket devices do at all better. Many are usb, which, even if you do have a fancy isosynchronous device, I'd still expect to be significantly slower than in chipset or pcie.
I could be totally off¡
But I dont think there's really specific chipset capabilities that make a bug difference here (other than iso, which only helps to counter the downgrade of using usb). Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware capability thing? I think it's just drivers, that modern tech like pipewire has many of the benefits for free about more closely mapping hardware resources to where apps can use it. I thought ASIO is mostly a product segmentation thing. It'd be neat to take a software virtual adapter like ASIO4ALL & see what kind of buffering really is required there, see what latency that brings consumer gear down to.
I do also remember Android fighting to get their latency down to reasonable levels, which counter to my point suggests latency in general is somewhat hard. There are much fewer system resources there, not missing a tick is harder to insure, but iirc the bigger issue was just that modems & the regular audio subsystems just had really funky audio driver paths that's been slapped together for a really long time, & some modernjzatuon was drsperately needed. This was like... 7+ years ago maybe?
> Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware capability thing
Yeah there's replacement ASIO drivers for the onboard sound such as ASIO4ALL or FLEXASIO. But I can agree with TremendousJudge that I've never gotten reasonable low latency with them, no matter my buffer size.
I can only speak for my own experience, but the cheapest Focusrite outperformed my builtin soundcard with ASIO4ALL drivers both in latency and quality. On the builtin, getting the latency lower than 12ms resulted in noticeable glitches.
