lol.
First of all this is not a workaround, this is actually how it works. Even Focusrite recommend on their own support pages to disable exclusive mode on Windows…
And, the round trip latency in ASIO will remain the same, sorry for repeating again but Exclusive Mode is only a setting for Windows, it will only affect the audio channels used by Windows (see Windows as a program, just like Cubase).
The ASIO latency and the Windows latency are completely independent, if you set both Cubase and Windows to the same output of your audio interface, the audio stream of Cubase (ASIO) will be directly handled by the ASIO driver and routed to the physical output without ever going through Windows, while the audio stream of Windows (WASAPI, MME, etc) will be first handled by Windows before going through the ASIO driver which then redirects the whole mix to the physical output.
But hell that looks very hard to understand.
I have even put, at the end of my guide, a link to a page that explains all of this. Here’s an image taken from it, maybe that’ll help you see clearer :
Cubase is on the right, “audio from other apps”, and its audio stream always goes directly into the ASIO driver (Audio Driver) and is clearly not in the Windows audio path, as it completely bypass the Endpoint Buffers, so just explain me how modifying the Windows audio path, which is on the left side, would affect the performance of ASIO !?
And last but not least, the “exclusive mode” settings in Windows audio channels properties, has nothing to do with the actual API Shared and Exclusive modes, which adds to the confusion.
These exclusive mode settings do not serve as a toggle between the actual Shared and Exclusive modes, it only defines how the channels should react when an audio API requests their exclusive use, and it is the API itself, as a separate program/instance, that can work either in Shared or Exclusive mode, not the channels !
As someone said earlier in this topic, when WASAPI is available for a particular program, we generally can choose between Shared or Exclusive. THAT is the actual exclusive mode, and again, this has absolutely nothing to do with ASIO.