going from 10.12.3 to 10.12.4 introduced issues - scrambled popup windows
 

i've been very happily working with 2 24" screens hooked up via a Dell D1000 doc, using the february 3rd drivers on OS X 10.12.3. on a 2012 macbook pro (non-retina)

upgraded to 10.12.4 the other day, which introduced issues that make working with this setup impossible. :(

issues:
- scrambled popups & other screen elements
- slow performance; dragging windows, doc magnification

The scrabled screen elements are the real problem; f.i. an 'open file' window is completely scrambled, not usable whatsoever, moving the window to the onboard screen resolves the issue.
Also, dragging elements in an application i use (Axure RP) scrambles the elements, and brings the system almost to a halt.

Tried de- and reinstalling the drivers, which at first seemed to resolve the problem, but it has since returned. Perhaps a cold boot/ restart solved it temporarily, and disconnecting/reconnecting with the dock causes the problem to reappear? (this happens several times a day, on 10.12.3 without issues)

i'll update this post with a screenshot.

Is there any info on an upcomming driver update that might resolve this issue? other ideas?

Sames issues with Lenovo Thinkpad USB 3.0 Ultra Dock
 

I am having the same issues with my Thinkpad USB 3.0 Ultra Dock connected to my mid 2012 Macbook Pro Retina. I have two external DELL Monitors connected to the Ultra Dock. Some windows get completely scrambled. Particularly Parallels & Firefox but also any kind of progress bars. All windows are fine on the built-in laptop screen.
This please needs to be addressed ASAP as this renders the machine almost useless.

I have attached screenshots from my Parallels window both from an external monitor and moved over to the built in monitor. The scrambling also happens in full screen mode on the external monitors.

I have installed the latest version (3rd Feb. 2017).

I'm seeing the same thing; here's Parallels 12 and VLC 2.1.1 being mirrored on the native monitor and the DisplayLink monitor.

In the DisplayLink monitor, both apps show garbled visuals.

I had upgraded the DisplayLink driver to version 3.0 and saw this.
I tried downgrading the DisplayLink driver to version 2.6 and I see the same results.

Hi All,

This is almost certainly a regression in the SW renderer in 10.12.4.
If this is confirmed, we can't do anything about this in the driver and it's very important to raise bugs with Apple as soon as possible to get this rectified earlier.

You can use bugreporter.apple,com or if you are in a corporate, ask for a fix from your support representative.
We'll add our own bug ID for these rendering issues to the Sierra list. It was getting much better but unfortunately there are a couple of new regressions now.

Kind regards,
Carlo

bugreport
 

bug reported via bugreport.apple.com: 31397501

Bug reported to apple
 

Issue #31397880

submitted bug report #31406921

Same issue
 

I have the same issue on 3x 19 inch monitors.

But for the most part any window dragged onto those monitors exhibit the scrambled windows.

I tried going back to the older driver but that did not work.

Any planned beta's that could address this?

Same issue here. The monitor directly connected to my MacBookPro is fine. It's only the one connected with Display Link. And it's also only when I try using Windows via Parallels 12. So this pretty much kills productivity for me at home or in the office as I have the same set up at both locations. Based on past bugs being reported, how long might this take to be rectified? Really pissed.....:mad:

Exactly the same issue, I just updated to Mac Sierra 10.12.4.

Connected with 3 external displays and a DELL D3100 Dock.

Was perfect 2 days ago, now is horrible.

Word = unusable
Parallels = unusable
MS Windows = unusable
MS Project = unusable
Plus numerous other applications

I hope there is a solution soon, otherwise I'll have to bin the DELL dock using DisplayLink technology at it's heart and use only one external monitor connected directly to Thunderbolt port.

It's a pity because it was/is a wonderful solution which suited my needs and budget. Don't really want to spend $3000 to get a new mac with 4 thunderbolt ports to run 3 external displays.

Thanks.


31449613 (Apple Bug report was submitted successfully).

Same for me - the DL USB monitor is completely garbled in Parallels and native dialogs like the desktop background pref panel. I can't even use it for what does work, since there are freezes/slowdowns and CPU spikes. I'm on a 2012 non-retina MBP, and everything was working perfectly before I made the mistake of upgrading. Unfortunately, I didn't see this issue when searching for upgrade problems beforehand (argh!)

I'm on an old mac and don't have a corporate apple account, so hopefully those on newer machines that do will be able to successfully apply the pressure needed to fix these unnecessary and obviously untested regressions that are being released into production prematurely.

(Conspiracy-minded people may notice this coincides with apple's new anti-laptop ads in their move towards killng off laptops and switching to iOS-only mobile devices. I think macs will finally be obsolete in their eyes as soon as XCode - the software required to develop for iphones and ipads - can actually run on an ipad.)

Hi All,

Strangely enough this issue does not seem to affect all Macs, even if the same model. I have on my desk a mid-2012 MBP retina that shows the issue and one that does not.

So far I've verified the following do not work:
- Word 2016
- PowerPoint 2016 slideshow
- Keynote
- VLC
- Parallels

Screenshots don't show problems, so it's probably not SW renderer and more a later buffer issue. The kind of corruption also suggests that.

We'll continue investigating.

Regards,
Carlo

Apple has responded
 

Engineering has determined that your bug report (31397880) is a duplicate of another issue (26394372) and will be closed.

The open or closed status of the original bug report your issue was duplicated to appears in the yellow "Duplicate of XXXXXXXX" section of the bug reporter user interface. This section appears near the top of the right column's bug detail view just under the bug number, title, state, product and rank.

An example of the duplicate section from the bug reporter user interface with your bug and the duplicate bug info is included below:

31397880 After upgrading to 10.12.4 window content on external monitors is garbled

State: Closed Product:
Rank: No Value
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Duplicate of 26394372 (Open or Closed; log in to see the actual state)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you pmoston,

We have quite a few bugs duplicate of 26394372, it looks like a catchall for rendering issues on virtual screens.

We have found a possible workaround that worked in our lab: resetting the system management controller.
I suspect an inconsistency between GPU settings between SMC and OS at the time of upgrading to 10.12.4.

In any case I'd suggest to try this workaround. The instructions are in https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201295

Please let me know if this helps for you, in case we'll publish the workaround in our FAQ.

Kind regards,
Carlo

Seemed to make it a little better, but still have corruption of the some windows...

I was hopeful when I logged in and saw your suggestion Carlo. I reset per the instructions and nothing has changed unfortunately. Still messed up as before. Prior I could have Parallels open in all 3 displays. My laptop and the 2 external monitors. Not an option anymore. Now I'm limited to the original 2 (laptop and the one external which is Thunderbolt to HDMI. I can however run any Mac programs and run Chrome in the 3rd window being powered by Display Link.

Only temporary
 

Hi Carlo,
the fix was only temporary. After about 20 minutes of working the screen was corrupted again. (Parallels on an external monitor in full screen). :(

My console (console.app) is being flooded with messages

standard 09:39:56.206890 +0200 WindowServer No matching context for device (0x7f991b7123b0) - disabling OpenGL

This only happens with the Display Link hub attached. Any connection?
Maybe the others can check if their console also exhibits the same behaviour?
Regards
Philip

Thank you for trying this out.

At the moment the SMC workaround is still working for us so we no longer have any reproduction in our lab: identical systems work well too.
We have uploaded all information to Apple: we have sysdiagnose for all configurations. Our bug ID is 31495935.

The WindowServer error message may be related in some way but it's now new.

pmoston, it would be fantastic to understand in which circumstances the issue comes back if you can see any pattern. We'll keep trying on our side too.

Kind regards,
Carlo

I've found for Parallels, if you go to "Configure" on the virtual machine, select the "Hardware" tab, go to "Graphics", click "Advanced Settings" and turn OFF "3D acceleration", that this seems to resolve issues for Parallels with a DisplayLink device. You can only make this change when the virtual machine is OFF, and you must make this change for each virtual machine.

That said, I would really love to see a fix for VLC, as I tend to have this on the DisplayLink screen.

Disabling "hardware acceleration" in their preferences screen doesn't resolve issues there; I suspect the setting actually doesn't work.

If I had a guess, it would be any application using 3d hardware acceleration are the applications having issues.

Cannot even use word
 

I just join the family of usb to hdmi. I have had two screen and use DisplayLink to add another rotated screen specially for writing.
The delay can be tolerated. But I cannot use word and did not find any similar issues yet. Anyone knows how to solve it? Thanks a lot!

I attach the screen for word, which shows very unusable.

macOS 10.12.4
iMac 27'', late 2013

quick update
 

my bugreport has been picked up @ bugreport.apple.com, i've been requested to do a sysdiagnose & send it up to them. will do so when i'm back in office tomorrow
we'll see where it goes from there...

p.s. just read about the SMC reset option ('ve been out with a bug myself the last couple days) will give that a go as well

SMC reset not a fix
 

SMC reset does not fix the problem for me unfortunately...

SMC does not work for me.

Disabling 3D acceleration for my Parallels Windows VM does work, if you can call it that. It's incredibly slow and not a real solution, but it may help point to the root cause of the problem.

@Carlo you said that the DisplayLink team currently can't reproduce the problem after SMC. Can you confirm whether or not you're doing any testing with Parallels VMs, or only native host windows?

I have not seen differences between running a Parallels VM or VLC or Word or the other affected applications: they're all affected in a similar way at the same time.

With Parallels I've tried a VM with Windows 7 on it.

After the SMC reset I still have no reproduction. We've been trying hard on a few systems but cannot find a way to re-introduce the issue.

Regards,
Carlo

Wait wait wait I've got it back.
If I turn on "Automatic graphics switching" off in the Energy Saver preference, I can reproduce the issue. Turning it on again resolves the issue the next time the window is on the DisplayLink screen.

Point is, we already tried playing with this setting before the SMC reset and it did not make any difference either way. Definitely an inconsistency about deciding which GPU or SW renderer is rendering which buffer.

So YMMV but it would be interesting to know if any affected system on the forum does NOT have a discrete GPU.

Will update Apple with the finding.

Kind regards,
Carlo

I have a 2011 MacBook Pro 15" with two identical monitors connected, one via the miniDisplay port and one via the USB port using DisplayLink. Several applications, including Word 2016 and Parallels desktop exhibit extremely slow response on the DisplayLink-connected monitor, but are fine on the other monitor. I have file bug report 31605058 with Apple. This started happening after installing MacOS 10.12.4.

SMC did not seem to work
 

So I am running dual 32" Planar PXL3280W monitors with a resolution of 2560x1440 on each monitor. when using the monitors I have issues with all my windows on either screen changing to full white boxes. it normally happens when scrolling a web browser or moving windows around on the screen. I also have issues now since upgrading to sierra 10.12.4 with windows being scrambled this issue seems to occur with applications that are using graphic acceleration or 3d as i see it when using my video conferencing application and Autocad. Prior to the last update from APPLE i did not have issues with either application.

just checked the auto graphics switching option; it doesn't seem to influence the scrambled screens for me unfortunately, that is on my 2012 non-retina mbp with dual graphics (NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB)

ps, my bugreport is still open after having supplied a sysdiagnosis

same here, my bugreport got squashed, due to being a duplicate. bugreport 26394372 is still open... i'm still hoping this issue will be fixed when 1.12.5 will be released (don't really have the option to try out beta's here)

I have 10.12.5 Beta (16F71b) installed and it's not working well for me- no display at all (just black screen) on my DisplayLink monitor. If I roll my mouse onto it, that does show but no desktop background and dragging a window there just makes it disappear.

edit: I am on the final 10.12.5 now (16F73) and my DL connected display works again. Mystery.

Here is a datapoint that might help others:

2014 rMBP with discrete video card will cause the scrambled screen issue 100% of the time when the discrete video card is being used. I can monitor this in the energy section of activity monitor. Launching certain applications requires "High Perf GPU".

I can also replicate the issue 100% of the time when I disable "automatic graphic switching".

Co-workers with 2015 rMBP is able to use discrete video card without any issues. Other users with 2015 rMBP and no discrete video card never experience the issue.

Hope this helps others...

This was posted a month ago and there have been no updates. Mine doesn't work AT ALL with my macbook pro, whereas it used to. I say, either update the driver appropriately, show me how to make it work, or send me my money back... Because this is infuriating, and the product isn't maintaining the standards for and specifications for which it was purchased. I'd really rather write a glowing thank you than a condemning review...

I have a Macbook Pro 13" middle of 2012, and I am still running 10.12.3 which works very well. Does anyone have experience with this setup running 10.12.4?

I don't understand how every single release can mess up so much... Apple seems to be remaking driver code all the time, breaking compatibility to everything you have connected.

Working with 10.12.5??
 

So, has anyone with the issues in this thread upgraded to 10.12.5 yet to see if Apple's bug that is causing this has been resolved yet? I'm still keeping my machine at 10.12.3 just to keep my monitors working.

I'm on 10.12.5 and it was working Ok for me. I see DL 3.1 was released yesterday I have't tried yet but that should be even better.

I've updated to Sierra 10.12.5 as well as v3.1 of the DL driver and I'm still having the same issue with the scrambled screen.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

so this is interesting, i updated to 12.5, and it worked... ...for about half a day... now i'm back at scrambled screens...

not sure what caused it, might have been locking the screen or google chrome running some stuff fullscreen... but nevertheless it is back, and rebooting doesn't help..


mbp same as kbmcguire

Thank you for the updates.

Despite much insistence, we have not heard from Apple recently about this issue, we probably need to see what happens at WWDC.
On both systems we have that can reproduce this issue we're now pretty stable with the issue reproducing reliably when GPU switching is enabled and not reproducing with it disabled.

I'd still recommend trying a SMC reset to bring the system to this deterministic state. Most likely it needs to be performed while GPU switching is enabled, but it's difficult to confirm as we can't get into the previous state.

This is all we have at the moment, I'm afraid it's not much and I can understand your frustration as I'm using an affected system myself.

Kind regards,
Carlo