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Old 11-17-2020, 12:53 AM   #1
shen_27
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Default General Display Link Questions

Hi Everyone,

I recently bought a laptop for work (CAD modeling mostly). It has an i7 10th generation intel, and a Quadro RTX 3000 graphics card.

I have dual 2560 x 1440 monitors I'd like to use as displays for the laptop. However, due to some faulty advertising, it looks like I only have one display out (HDMI) on my laptop.

I have multiple USB 3.2 ports, all of which are Gen 1 (3 type A's, one type C)

With that being said, my questions are....

1) Can display port easily drive one of my monitors at 60hz through one fo my USB ports?
2) If I end up purchasing a docking station, will transfering anything else through the calbe affect the quality of the picture? (ethernet, other periferals attached, etc.)
3) Will displaylink use my RTX graphics card for processing, or the native intel graphics card?
4) If I'm using a CAD program, which should be using my RTX card, can I display it on my second monitor using displaylink? Will this force the CAD program to switch to Intel graphics?
4) What type of performance hit can I expect on the CPU/RAM/etc.?
5) Will there be any noticable difference in the quality of the picture? I don't need perfect picture quality, but would like to know that I'm not going to see screen tearing or anything if I'm pushing my computer.

Depending on the answers, I may have to return the laptop, so any information anyone has would be much appreciated!

Thanks!
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Old 11-19-2020, 06:35 PM   #2
AlbanRampon
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Hello Shen,

1) Can DisplayLink easily drive one of my monitors at 60hz through one of my USB ports?
Yes, DisplayLink can drive 2560x1440p60 very easily. You can achieve multi-4K productivity on a USB3 5Gbps link so the link is comfortable. USB-C or USB-A makes not difference for DisplayLink technology as it uses USB traffic.

2) If I end up purchasing a docking station, will transferring anything else through the cable affect the quality of the picture? (ethernet, other peripherals attached, etc.)
Not noticeably at that resolution. Our adaptative algorithm can sense the bandwidth available both on the USB and computing. With a USB3 5Gpbs, you get 4.6Gbps of usable traffic and even if you keep the full 1Gbps for Ethernet, there are still 3.6Gpbs left.
I would recommend a product using the DL-6950 chip because of its better performance. If you transfer huge files from USB storage, then you might want to select a docking station which has a USB3.2 10Gbps hub inside, but that has nothing to do with DisplayLink and I would be surprised if your laptop doesn't offer it on at least one port. Webcams, mice, keyboards and headphones tend to be USB2, so a different pipe.

3) Will DisplayLink use my RTX graphics card for processing, or the native intel graphics card?
On a DL-6950 product, DisplayLink encoding would generally use the Intel graphics card with current driver releases which, in your case, is best as the RTX will be busy on CAD.

4a) If I'm using a CAD program, which should be using my RTX card, can I display it on my second monitor using DisplayLink?
Yes, you can use your CAD software on the RTX GPU for its computing. Display and compute functions can be separate.

4b) Will this force the CAD program to switch to Intel graphics?
No, it should not. There has been issues in the past which had workarounds. Microsoft fixed Windows 10 in August 2019. There is a regression today which is being looked at in the Intel graphics driver, but this can be worked around by downgrading the Intel driver, or other means.

4) What type of performance hit can I expect on the CPU/RAM/etc.?
The codec is adaptative so there is no definite answer. The load is based on how much is changing on your screen and its complexity. We optimize for best UX.

5) Will there be any noticeable difference in the quality of the picture? I don't need perfect picture quality, but would like to know that I'm not going to see screen tearing or anything if I'm pushing my computer.
Quality has different angles and so has pushing the computer. 2560x1440 is not a high resolution: it is not demanding.
The same general recommendations you would have for a non-docked scenario apply: if you do a lot of things at the same time, then you should have a dual channel RAM machine or it could be the bottleneck. An i7 is better than most and you effectively have 3 different compute engines on your machine: CPU, Intel GPU and Quadro GPU. You can max the Quadro and have the CPU not doing much. I would personally not buy a Windows 10 laptop with less than 16GB of RAM, especially with CAD software.

I hope this helps.
Kind regards,
Alban
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