Audio Stutter Win10 64bit 20H2

Hey, I thought I would ask here if anyone knows how to mitigate or even get rid of the audio stuttering issues on the latest live release 20H2.

When I'm playing any kind of sound in audio players, browsers etc, If I try to move the cursor over anything, be it a link in the browser, a folder or even buttons in the used player, I have some serious audio micro lags. The only scenario when I have normal audio is when I play any games, watch movies in full screen or simply don't move the mouse (which kills the idea of multitasking heh ...). I tried everything I could possibly do:

- disabled throtthling,
- disabled all energy saving options and set the power plan to max efficiency,
- set the highest priorities to the player/browser processes,
- reinstalled all drivers,
- tried every samplerate from 44100 to 192Hz, also tried various buffer sizes.

And finally, just to be sure, I replaced the USB cable to the audio interface. In the worse case scenario, I will need to go back to the previous Win10 version.

PS. I checked with LatencyMon - there are no problems with latency (unless I start some heavy video processing, but imo that's normal)

Since you've done 50 impressive things I just want to make sure you ran an SFC?

One of the 50 said "impressive" things, just forgot to mention it ... It was the first thing after update that I tried. No luck.

Did you open a new user or safe mode or whatever it's called?

The Pool Man said:

Did you open a new user or safe mode or whatever it's called?

I tried before on a separate account with admin rights, no changes.

Lance1 said:

Does dxdiag find anything?

Unfortunately nothing.

Lance1 said:

you say that you reloaded the divers. Have you tried uninstalling the drivers and restart the system and have windows load the default drivers?

It's not possible to use anything other than the provided drivers. I tried reinstalling in safe mode, including registry clean up in between. The problem here is the fact that Motu M4 needs additional drivers and there are only two versions of them, tried both already.

This problem is occurring only on systems with external audio interfaces that need additional drivers. I didn't tried to use the onboard sound card, because I need that interface for sound processing.

Just here to give a heads up to all the other people that are using the latest Win 1020H2.
After some serious digging I found the culprit, it's the latest Edge Chromium and it's new way of handling process priorities. If it stays in the background, it overwrites everything (priority rule wise), even if you're not actively using it. The only way to fix the audio stuttering is to disable this feature in Edge flags.

Below is how to do it:
Go to Edge://flags
Search for "Delay Competing Low Priority Requests" and disable it

This fixes all the problems I had

Thanks this fixed my problem