Comment 112 for bug 371897

PA will never be an option for gaming in Wine. You're right, we have to get in contact with the PA developers, to make sure PA allows us to bypass it entirely.

"Good latency" is not enough, we need "no latency". Even if PA gets latency down to 50 or even 25 ms it is way too long. Did you ever watch a professional counterstrike player? My (unscientific) estimate is that the (eye,ear) -> hand reaction time is around 100 ms. Adding another 25 ms game -> sound hardware delay is absolutely unacceptable.
CS players say that they feel the difference between a 20 ms ping and a 50 ms network ping when playing online, and I am sure they are right about this.

If a sound server is active by default that needs extra user action to be bypassed then it will make Linux unusable for professional gamers. Gamers do not care about mixing two applications' sounds, since they have only one app anyway.

ARTS surrendered its exclusive control of the sound device when it was not used, and we need at least something like that from PA for proper DirectSound support. A better solution would be if PA passed alsa calls through to the driver without going through its mixer when only one app is using alsa, and transparently enables and disables the mixer if other apps pop up.