Realtime performance of DAWs

I do a lot of audio recording, mixing and processing using Steinberg's Cubase SX 3. I also do a lot of midi sequencing work in the program. I am always on the search for more performance because i am always running out of CPU power and this is especially true for low latency real time sequencing.

What i want to know is what approach Vista will have with the digital audio industry? does it aim to make improvements to the way audio and midi is processed or how it is supported in digital audio workstations?

Windows xp has been a good base for DAWs but in my mind it has had some shortcoming as well. Midi timing can be notciably loose during heavy CPU usage and CPU usage can double when the buffer is dropped from 1024samples to 64samples. Of course this could be up to the software programmers or the sound card drivers or the hardware i am using. However, i have seen a lot of software and hardware tested which produce very similar trends in performance and not much improvement on the situation.

I took the liberty of trying out Vista the other day. I installed cubase and my soundcard drivers fine. I must state at this point that Cubase and my soundcard were never desinged for Vista and it is a beta so what i am about to say lacks base: The audio performance at low latencies is much worse than in XP. At a buffer size of 64 samples i am unable to play back a project without dropouts. This project ran fine under XP.

On a good note i ran a little dos prompt utility called midi time which runs two midi clocks. One with the windows timestamp and one without. Under xp it would go out of sync in a few minutes but under Vista the sync lasted over an hour.

So where do we go from here.

Will their be further performance adjustments.?

Can midi get tighter still?

Will audio be able to run at latencies of 64samples and even below that down to real time processing?

Is it upto my hardware manufacturer to produce better drivers or are the XP ones suitable?

Is it upto steinberg to support Vista or should it just run fine?

Additionaly all the work i do utilises Steinberg's ASIO driver. There is also an option to run MME but they have a huge latency under XP. What can i expect from the new MME in Vista?

Thanks for your time

Jon