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?
The latter, except that you might not get quite the full frame-rate (especially on two monitors at once) as it takes a certain amount of CPU (not GPU) to compress the rendered frames and squirt them over USB to the dock.
Edit: At least, that's how it works in Windows. The Linux drivers work the former way. I never got involved with the Macintosh drivers, so I don't know which way they do it. Whipping away the rendered frames from under the very nose of the video driver did require substantial deviousness and cunning on the part of Displaylink's Windows driver writers, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Macintosh video driver stack didn't allow for it.
Peter
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