Blech.

I'm sure the USB3 cable is fast and all, but I'm pretty sure nothing that they stuff into that dock (which is little more than a glorified USB hub) will be as good as a recent Nvidia chip.

Well, one option I have, is to also go to the trouble of docking the HDMI cable to the laptop, and use only one of the monitor outputs on the dock.

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

I can answer the question of how the Mac drivers work...




...they don't

Have had to give up on my DisplayLink adapter and OSX ever working reliably again.

What do you use instead?

I have yet to find a suitable Thunderbolt/DisplayLink dock configuration that can drive dual external displays.

Interesting! Well, I'm not intending to play games on both monitors, just one of them. The second monitor would have nothing changing on it, unless I chose to put up a chat window or an email checker there or something. Do you think it would help the frame rate if the second monitor didn't have any image changes?



The attached monitors are displaying data compressed images? Sigh.

Also, when I'm using this thing for audio tracking, I'm concerned about its fan noise, so anything taxing the CPU (like data compressing a video screen image) will probably increase CPU usage enough to make this thing's fan kick in. Sigh.

Thanks for the expert explanation of the way the dock functions. This is quite fascinating. Looks like I'll be using the dock for the secondary screen, and using direct-connected HDMI cable for the primary screen. I'm up to three plugs' worth of docking now (power, USB3, and HDMI), but luckily those are all grouped together on the same side of the laptop, the side facing away from me where it'll be sitting on my desk. So that's a plus.

Hm. Now that I'm committed to using the HDMI plug, I wonder if there's any way to make that HDMI cable connect into a dual-DVI setup, and I can skip the dock completely and just us a big USB3 hub instead. I wonder if a single HDMI cable has the capability to carry dual monitor information if the video driver supports it? I'll look that up. (*edit:* Nope)

I don't, I have a single external 27 inch monitor now.

Reading back on my comments, Peter, I think it looks like I'm making disparaging remarks about the Displaylink technology. Sorry about that! I want to clarify that I'm impressed by the technology, and when the laptop arrives tomorrow, I'll be hooking up both monitors directly to the dock first, with the expectation that it'll Just Work Perfectly even for games.

I've just been spoiled in the past by laptop docks with directly-connected dual DVI outputs, and it's a shame that laptops which offer that kind of option are becoming more rare. I'm impressed that USB3, combined with that Displaylink technology, has given users a workable alternative. Knowing that it does The Right Thing (as best it can within the constraints) with regard to 3D game graphics is quite impressive.

That is just the sort of thing the Matrox GXM products do.

DualHead2Go is the product name

www.matrox.com

Lossless compression is used for the actual data transfer between PC and Displaylink adapter, to decrease the USB bandwidth requirement. But it is lossless, so the image on the monitor will be as crisp and perfect as it was originally drawn.

My big beef with DisplayLink, is their utter lack of support for the USB 3.0 variants on Linux. The USB 2.0 chips/adapters all work beautifully well, but they're being cripplingly secretive about the newer superspeed devices.

Awesome! Okay, I'm not so worried about it now.

I suppose if I really wanted to lower the CPU usage, I could change my wallpaper to a solid color.

Yeah, I was just reading about that, shortly before seeing your post. Interesting idea, tricking the system into thinking it's one big desktop, sending that down the cable, and splitting it in two again. Great work-around to a mind bogglingly silly little problem that they shouldn't have ever had to work around in the first place.

I love how their spiel touts the "one taskbar across both monitors" thing as a feature, when it's really just a side effect of the trick they're doing.

I'm enjoying the way you speak authoritatively about how it works, while in the very same post admitting that Displaylink are secretive about how it works. In fact the USB3 chips (unlike the USB2 ones) do use lossy compression, though it's a dynamic scheme where it gets less and less lossy if you've got plenty of CPU or bandwidth, or large unchanging areas of screen.

Peter

Oh, really? Then my apologies.
Not that anyone outside of DisplayLink would know how the USB3 ones work.

And one more reason not to get the USB3 variants.

EDIT: And I really do have (and like) the DL-195 USB2 version!

Thanks.

So far, pretty impressed with this dock.

Using the USB3 connection, I cannot see any evidence that the image is data compressed. I was expecting it to look like Satellite TV, but it's just looking exactly like a directly-plugged monitor.

I haven't tried any games yet, I'm slowly exorcising the bloatware at the moment. But the system is working well and it's driving three monitors right now, counting the laptop.

One question: The Displaylink driver places an extra icon in the windows system tray, is there a way I can turn that off?

I don't know whether there's an option in the software itself to turn it off, but doesn't Windows itself let you tidy away system-tray icons you don't use?

Failing that, I'm pretty sure that the process that has the system-tray icon, is completely separate from the DLM process that does the actual work, so you could just arrange to not autostart the process with the icon.

Peter

I've always completely turned off that feature, since it tended to hide programs from me, programs that I didn't want to leave running. Though there were many cases of that happening to me before, here is a specific important example of why the feature is bad: Where I work, that feature is, interestingly, partially responsible for bricking certain modems. Certain models of old Verizon+Novatel modems would be bricked if you inserted them into a computer that was running the Sprint SmartView software (Sprint tries to apply its carrier profile to the Verizon modem). Since SmartView is one of those programs which auto-runs, and when you close it, instead of exiting, it minimizes into one of those tray icons, if you have the hide-trayicons feature turned on, you don't know it's running, so you'll get your verizon modem bricked if you insert it.

However, despite all that, I may reconsider my "never hide icons" policy now. Sony has a Control Center app which is important, controlling (among other things) charge limiters on the battery to improve its lifespan, Touchpad multitouch gestural control (scroll/pinch etc), the hard disk drop sensor, etc. The problem is that it also puts a couple of unwanted icons in the system tray for which there is no option to turn them off: A Scroll Lock on/off indicator (?!) and a touchpad on/off indicator. So, failing a way to get those things to turn off, I might have to enable the icon hider feature.



I shall investigate this! Thanks!

On my Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the official Lenovo USB3 dock (using the same Displaylink technology) you could noticeably see some block artifacts whilst playing the flash game Candy Crush on Facebook. I don't have it any more, but that was the only time it was truly noticeable from memory.

Everything else was fine. Even playing video seemed good enough surprisingly although I might have only tried that once or twice. Certainly for all things business you would never have noticed. Even running the Solidworks eDrawing viewer went quite well.

Well, after all that trouble, and moving everything over to USB, it turns out the USB interface is crap and that there is a driver bug that makes USB unworkable for that audio interface. I'm investigating competitor's options now, hopefully they won't have the same driver bug.

http://support.presonus.com/entries/21477544-Is-my-AudioBox-compatible-with-USB-3-0-
http://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/32657.page
http://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/33427.page
http://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/45417.page
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3BPEEMAR9P5TG/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R3BPEEMAR9P5TG

Ended up getting one of these, and I like it so far:
http://tascam.com/product/us-1800/

Not as feature-rich as the Presonus unit, it doesn't have all the software effect bells and whistles, and it doesn't have a software mixer panel with a bunch of routing options. On the other hand, all those things generally just got in my way before, and I kind of like its simplicity. We'll see how it does long-term.