I'm not so sure about losing ticks with DDE.
I track the E-mini bid / ask realtime using an Excel & IB feed , which lately has been quite fast, and I get no sense that there's any significant lag in speed.
Now, it's possible that if there were 20 messages send in a second , there would be a problem, but since I can't think that fast it's not an issue.
All I can tell you is, that if the ES ticks down 5 times in 2 seconds, I'm catching all the changes.