Latest DisplayLink drivers and DirectX fullscreen errors

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by Fektoer

Thanks for the reply though, the load would make more sense if that's true. Not to say i understand -why- it would have to emulate anything. It only has to pass through the signal received from the hdmi cable, done. Let my laptop handle all the graphical heavylifting.

I don't know which dock you're using, but the one I have is connected with a single USB cable - not the HDMI port of my laptop. While I agree that it should be just passing through the data from the graphics card, I'm not sure how much "access" they have to that and there will definitely be a delay between grabbing the graphics chip's framebuffer and the displaylink one. It also has to compress that into a format compatible with the decoder inside the dock itself (I doubt it's a raw RGB stream or anything similar, especially considering that it can support multiple displays, ethernet and USB - not much bandwidth to spare, even on USB3, let alone USB2),which again will have an impact.

I think that much we all accept though, it's the fact that it's outright incompatible with some software that we have issues with. That and the fact that they just don't want to respond.

[Fektoer]

Fair enough, i was a bit too enthusiastic with my response. Mine is connected with a single usb cable too. So yes, it might not be as easy as a simple throughput.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...n&sku=332-0446

Going by the description of the product you would assume it could handle an HD display with less problems. Especially since it's advertised as being able to connect two displays at once. I don't wanna know what it would do to my cpu if i would have 2 1920x1080 displays in extended setup...

And yes, i would accept a bit of slowdown. But i won't accept incompatibility with software or issues like persistent fps drops. Especially for the price they come at.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by Fektoer

Fair enough, i was a bit too enthusiastic with my response. Mine is connected with a single usb cable too. So yes, it might not be as easy as a simple throughput.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...n&sku=332-0446

Going by the description of the product you would assume it could handle an HD display with less problems. Especially since it's advertised as being able to connect two displays at once. I don't wanna know what it would do to my cpu if i would have 2 1920x1080 displays in extended setup...

And yes, i would accept a bit of slowdown. But i won't accept incompatibility with software or issues like persistent fps drops. Especially for the price they come at.

I completely agree with you, the compatibility issues are indeed a problem and even if they can't fix it, they need to be more up front about it.

Interestingly, I don't actually see large CPU spikes on my setup and I am running 2x 1080p monitors

[Fektoer]

Weird. No idea what causes it then. What threw me for a loop and nearly made me return my laptop since i thought it had faulty hardware, was the fact that during my fps drops none of my performance meters would indicate a problem. I could see the displaymanager service hogging up a lot of cpu power, but no spike or anything that would indicate a performance loss. The displaymanager service would hog up nearly the same amount of cpu percentage when the laptop was performing fine.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by Fektoer

Weird. No idea what causes it then. What threw me for a loop and nearly made me return my laptop since i thought it had faulty hardware, was the fact that during my fps drops none of my performance meters would indicate a problem. I could see the displaymanager service hogging up a lot of cpu power, but no spike or anything that would indicate a performance loss. The displaymanager service would hog up nearly the same amount of cpu percentage when the laptop was performing fine.

I wish I could offer more insight on what's causing that. For such a detrimental but sporadic performance drop, I can only presume it's a race condition, something is blocking something else that's time sensitive, likely stalling the graphics card. It might not even be the displaylink software, though obviously that's the likely culprit.

[Fektoer]

This weekend will probably establish that when i put in some more hours behind my laptop. As it stands, removing the drivers instantly fixed the directx problems of aforementioned games and gave a noticable gfx improvement on games like Diablo 3. So far i have had no fps drops anymore but then again, i went without fps drops for a few days before (only to have it drop every 15 min or so the days after). So i'm hopeful.

At first i thought it was a problem concerning windows 8.1 and external gpus. A blizzard representative said that they had problems before with applications switching to the internal gpu instead of using the more powerful external gpu using windows 8.1 and geforce drivers. However, it happens with every application (not only blizzard applications), different gfx drivers and different OS (windows 7).

[Trekari]

Displaylink,

Would you mind explaining the customer service you believe you're providing with this issue STILL outstanding?

Just tried to play Skyrim...kept crashing at startup. Removed displaylink drivers, which means no DCS A-10C or Falcon BMS 4, and Skyrim magically works again.


Seriously, this is beyond absurd to not be capable or willing to fix this problem for your users, and I'll be making sure my flight sim buddies know about it.

[Trekari]

I've begun my anti-displaylink campaign, and it's going to continue on Facebook, Twitter, and my flight sim forums until you resolve this issue.

Your company has NO excuse for this. Honestly this is worse support than even Saitek or EA provides, and those companies are sh**.

[Trekari]

Displaylink,

Any update on your "WeDoNotCareAboutProblemsOurCustomersHave-itis?"

[valeryan]

Wow, This thread has been around for 2 years detailing this error. I work for a game studio and we recently purchased about 6 of these to test and see if they would be useful to our company. Its nice that not only does our game crash in full-screen mode when using these docks but now the game crashes when the dock is not connected. Way to go guys. I work with hundreds of software developers and to have such a horrible bug in our software for over 2 years would not be acceptable on any level. Especial a personal developer level. I know I wouldn't like looking at myself in the mirror. You know I wouldn't mind games not working with your driver when its connected but to screw up games all the time on a system with this software is unacceptable. You should all be stripped of your CS degrees and go back to college for a liberal arts degree.

Anyway, We have a massive community of players that enjoy our game and we have decided to detail our experiences with displaylink enabled equipment in our dev blog and our community forum. I am sure our players will love to hear how they can run out and get equipment using your software and completely gut their ability to play our game and pretty much every other game on the market. We will be making sure they know to avoid products using your software.

Thanks