In effect, the resulting latency of the system is proportional to LatencyBuffer x MaxOutputBuffe rSize. The two key variables here are LatencyBuffer and MaxOutputBufferSize. And it would seem that these are set by default very conservatively (resulting in high latency). The file that you’re looking for is rocksmith.ini located in your Steam/steamapps/common/Rocksmith directory.

Thankfully however, there are some configuration settings that can be tweaked to improve the performance of the Real Tone cable. But I’m loathed to hack about my game in a way that could make it look like I’m pirating something on Steam that I totally legitimately own, just so that I can use some hardware that never would have been considered when they designed this game for console (grrr, console-ports).

There are No-Cable hacks which allow you to play the game using your on-board soundcard (which presumably would suffer from high noise issues without the proper pre-amps of an instrument specific interface), and this hack should allow me to use my hardware instead of the Real Tone (one should imagine). Ideally I would like to be able to use my new TASCAM audio interface as my guitar input, but Ubisoft also use the Real Tone cable as their form of copy protection. What I haven’t discussed much is using the cable for what it was originally designed for: playing Rocksmith! Plenty of criticism comes from the latency present in-game – and I agree, it can be distracting. However, once it climbs too high it becomes unplayable. Lower latency of course is always desirable, but a little latency can be lived with without ruining the experience. One of the areas that I noted a large difference was that of latency – the gap in time between plucking a string and having the computer emit the sound as a note through the speakers. I’ve also been comparing its performance with a proper audio interface. Recently I have been posting about the Real Tone cable for use as a guitar audio interface for amp modelling and other Digital Audio Workstation duties.

Rocksmith audio engine settings