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DPC Latency Checker is a small and handy utility that can monitor your computer capabilities to handle various data streams.

It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs.

If any kernel-mode device driver in your Windows system is implemented improperly and causes excessive latencies of Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs) then probably drop-outs will occur when you use real-time audio or video streaming applications. For an explanation of this effect see Background information below.

The DPC Latency Checker tool determines the maximum DPC latency that occurs on your system and thus enables you to check the real-time capabilities of your computer.

DPC Latency Checker works independent of any external hardware. Using this tool may be helpful in the following situations:

You experience interruptions (drop-outs) in a flow of data processed in real-time, for example an audio stream, video stream or a sequence of measuring data, and you want to find out the reason for this problem.

You want to verify that your system is configured properly so that it is capable of handling real-time data transfer before you install the corresponding streaming application.

You want to check if a particular computer system is suitable for streaming applications, for example before you buy this system.