Defrag Tools #158 - Media eXperience Analyzer part 6: Audio Offload

In this episode of Defrag Tools, Chad Beeder and Jorge Novillo discuss a power saving feature in Windows: hardware offloading of Audio Processing Objects (APOs). We demonstrate how to use Media eXperience Analyzer (MXA) to determine whether audio offload is working on a given system.

Additional Resources:

Implementing Hardware Offloaded APO Effects
Windows 8.1 Audio streaming - Part 2: Power savings via H/W offload
What's New in Audio for Windows 10

Timeline:

[00:00] Introductions and overview
[02:25] To see if it's working: first capture a trace in Windows Performance Recorder (see Defrag Tools #149 for a demo)
[04:43] Examining the first trace. First look for the Audio_Render events to confirm that audio was playing during the trace.
[07:00] Filter down to the audiodg.exe process and note the audio pump thread running every 10ms. Conclusion: audio processing was not offloaded.
[08:07] Looking at the Callstacks dataset to find out which Audio Processing Object was running on the CPU.
[10:09] Examining a second trace for comparison. Same steps as before - no AudioDG pump thread running frequently. Conclusion: APO processing was offloaded in this case.
[12:24] Questions? Email us at defragtools@microsoft.com