Originally Posted By: peter
Pretty sure that's a Displaylink DL3xxx device, so there's little bits of my code running both in the embedded firmware in the dock, and in the Windows software stack that drives it.


Awesome! I shall think of you each time I dock my laptop. smile

Hey, since you know about this stuff, maybe you can answer a question I have. It's hard to google for this since my question is so wordy and I'm not sure of the correct terminology. I have yet to receive the laptop, I'll get it later this week. I have the dock, but no laptop to plug it into. But when I get it, I'm curious how the dock "works", so to speak. Here's my question:

Basically, I know that a video card has video outputs which map to its frame buffer. On my desktop PC, its video card has two outputs for two monitors, which run directly off the video card and map directly to its frame buffer, so I can display a 3D game running on either monitor at a frame rate which is the full capability of the video card.

My new laptop has only a middling Nvidia video chipset, but it's still heaps better than my decade-old video card in my current desktop PC, so I expect to be able to play a few relatively new games at better frame rates than my desktop could.

When I plug the docking station into the new laptop with the USB3 cable, though, how does it handle that for displaying games on the attached monitors? Does it install fresh video drivers which map to the USB device, and thus it's drivers for some sort of cheap video chipset installed in the dock, and thus, I won't be able to play a 3D game at a decent frame rate on either of the attached dual monitors? Or, is there something about the USB3 or DisplayLink standards which let the video chipset in the laptop continue to work normally, and then hand over its already-rendered video image to the dock, which then just blits the video image up to the attached monitors, so that I still get the full speed of the video card?
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Tony Fabris