The feedback I’m gathering is to get more info from users I may not be in contact with and make sure the improvement is positively affecting as many systems as possible and that it matches our expectations.
It is general and always active: by all means a different design.
The improvements should be more visible in two main cases: 1. high core-count, and 2. low latency on multi-core machines (but the processing overhead to sync the threads on the OS side is not affected, of course).
It is very relevant, as the way Cubase spawned threads previously is what made the MMCSS limitation exacly 14 (if Cubase didn’t spawn prefetch threads at all, which is not possible and just an example, the limit would have been 28).
Microsoft won’t change it, as this would have ‘system-wide performance implications’ (quoting Pete Brown here) and as mentioned previously “the long-term solution Pete talks about is something totally different and requires an engine re-write with different APIs”, and this is not something that can be done quick and without very extensive testing.