The simplest thing to do of course is just try it. You can install Windows in a VM without a product key and try it without limitation for something like 30 day

The simplest thing to do of course is just try it. You can install Windows in a VM without a product key and try it without limitation for something like 30 days. That said, "really low latency" is relative. Device assignment will give you excellent I/O performance in terms of sending data to/from the device, particularly for bulk DMA transfers. Where you (likely) still pay a penalty is in terms of interrupt delivery, as on most chips these are still routed through the host even in "passthrough" mode. Even so, you're looking at delays at the outside on the tens of microseconds scale, depending on which microarchitecture you're on and how well tuned the fiddly bits of your hypervisor (presumably KVM for most users) are. Some configurations will be much better behaved here. If your audio hardware goes into polling mode (or can be made to do so) when it is recording you can potentially avoid the interrupts entirely. (source: I work on Google Compute Engine, in particular on virtualized networking, historically on performance. Virtual interrupt delivery latency is a topic near and dear to my heart, although I don't know a damned thing about audio gear and its tolerances there :)