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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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**.

Displaylink,

Any update on your "WeDoNotCareAboutProblemsOurCustomersHave-itis?"

Wow, you guys really got to get this fixed
 

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

This thread contains lots of issues on games now, some of which were bugs that have been fixed in more recent releases and some that still exist.

We are aware of problems with some games in full screen mode, but there is no easy fix for these. One of the main problems is that games tend to use the graphics hardware directly in full screen mode, bypassing Desktop Window Manager (DWM). However this means that they bypass the DisplayLink virtual graphics driver and get confused when they try to use the graphics hardware and find DisplayLink also using the primary graphics card to render additional screens.

This is only in full screen mode, as in windowed mode the game goes through DWM and should function correctly. This is why we recommend running games in windowed mode.

We'd be happy to work with game developers to find a solution to supporting games in full screen, but we cannot do this without the support of the game engine developers. If you are a developer who could help with this, please contact us through "Ask a Question" on our website, so we can start a dialogue.

Wim

I am fine with your software causing games to have to run in windowed mode when the dock is hooked up. Its the fact that when I take my laptop home and set at my desk and try to launch a game I get the same error. Your software should not effect the normal operation of the system. I have tried stopping the service DisplayLinkManager and removing the processes for DisplayLinkUI.exe, and DisplayLinkuserAgent.exe from memory. But unless I uninstall your software, gaming is no dice. So maybe you can tell me what else I need to kill so I can build me a nice "I want to play games script" that kills everything I need to enjoy a nice game at home.

And as to any game studio developers trying to work with you... I am sorry I wish we could spare the time to help. We can't and most of the interaction with the system itself is handled by the engine. For example we used the unreal engine. It handles almost all hardware level access. You would need to talk with the engine developers to get anywhere with that line.


Thanks for the reply,

So, we would be mostly happy If we could play our other games at home without having to uninstall the software every night. We actually don't get to set around at work and play games all day.

OK. The problem is that to pull our driver out of the way, we need to restart the Windows graphics sub system. Normally Windows wants to reboot when the graphics sub system restarts. So you would still need to reboot before playing games.

Would this be OK? I think it gets more complex to find a way of pulling our driver out of the way without a reboot. At least you would not have to uninstall our software every time.

Wim

I am ok with a reboot vs uninstalling and every night and re-installing in the morning. I can actually see incorporating the procedure to makes games playable into my work flow when I shutdown in the evening. I would find this to be a usable workaround. What would I need to do?

ANY solution would be better than having to completely uninstall your drivers to play games such as Skyrim.

Hey Guys,
Just made an account to report my findings after a friend who works in your IT department informed me that some of my issues may have been caused by my DL device.

I tried to start developing a game using the Unreal Engine 4, however the 'launcher' to download the engine wouldn't even open and just hung using massive amounts of CPU. I assumed this issue was something to do with my slightly older hardware or the fact im using an APU, so I dismissed it and moved on.

I have now tried the following things and managed to get it to work:

1. I stopped the DL service, still didn't work.
2. I removed the DL device from my USB port, still didn't work.
3. I uninstalled the DL drivers using the uninstall tool and now the launcher works fine!

I would be happy to see a fix for this, and/or a method for disabling the driver quickly as I quite enjoy using my USB monitor but I also enjoy playing and making games! Let me know if there is any further information I can provide.

You can download the unreal engine 4 launcher from: https://www.unrealengine.com (you do not need to pay to download the launcher, only to login, but you can't get as far as to login with a DL monitor attached, and the UE logs are useless for debugging)

All the best guys and good luck with the fix!

(P.S. I have reported this as a bug with UE4 too: https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...aunchshow.html)

I'm having exactly the same issue and thought I would add my $0.02, having just found this forum after dealing with this problem for the past month or two. I bought a Targus ACP71USZ for my Ivy Bridge laptop around May, and have been having problems w/ fullscreen gaming since then, but to be honest I didn't do much PC gaming previously (was mostly on PS3) and didn't put 2 and 2 together that it was the dock drivers causing the issue.

However, today I just happened to chuck a SSD into my laptop as well, and reinstalled the OS and all software from scratch. As it happened, the DisplayLink driver was just about the very last thing to go on. Steam, conversely, was put on this morning, and I checked each of my 12 games earlier, as I installed them, verifying that each and every one was working fine in full screen condition (I even made a sys restore point at that juncture as I was so tickled to have apparently resolved the problem). However, immediately following the install of the latest DL driver (7.6.5563), all of the games I'd had trouble with immediately broke again.

Not that it really matters, obviously a ton of people are having exactly this issue, but here's my set up:

Windows 7 Home Premium (newly installed, fully updated)
Sony SVS151190X
Newest Intel HD4000 driver (10.18.10.3621)
Newest nVidia GeForce GT 640M LE driver (9.18.13.4043)
Newest Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible HC driver (1.0.10.255)
Newest Intel 7 Series/C216 Chipset HC driver (10.0.13.0)
Newest version of GeForce experience, etc., etc., etc.

And the score as to the games:
Unaffected games:
Awesomenauts
Dota 2

Affected games:
Borderlands 2 (not a big deal, can be set to run 1080p borderless window)
Left 4 Dead (ditto)
Left 4 Dead 2 (ditto)
Crusader Kings II (will run FS, but only at greatly reduced refresh rate of 25Hz)
Dungeon Defenders (will NOT run FS no matter the setup, and there is NO option to run borderless window, nor does any 3rd party full-screen wrapping software I can find work with this game; in otherwords, you will be absolutely stuck running it in a standard window if you load DL drivers)
Civ V (like CK2, has refresh rate problems w/ DL drivers installed but can be made to limp along)
The Witcher 1 + 2 (appear to have 1 working for now; 2 will only run after alt-tabbing over to close the Direct3D error message, and this will leave the taskbar on the screen over the bottom of your game for the rest of the session).

As with everyone else, this happens regardless of whether the machine is plugged into the dock or if a monitor is attached directly via HDMI or VGA, or even if the laptop is just outputting to its own built-in 1080p screen.

It's not the end of the world, the dock is still pretty useful to me (though not as useful as Sony simple separating the HDMI and VGA ports by another half-inch so I could plug in both outputs simultaneously might have been) and the -window -noborder switch is a great workaround for those games where it can be implemented, but it IS a drag not to be able to properly play one game (Dungeon Defenders) at all, and have to have to use obnoxious settings w/ three others (CK2, Civ 5, Witcher 2).

Over a month again with no progress...

More Games
 

Football Manager 2014 from EA

Divinity Original Sin - which may be a general Steam Problem or not.

This really sucks. It makes the docking station kind of redundant. :mad:

Hi All

We have created a tool that will enable you to disable the DisplayLink graphics drivers, which should work around the problems with games. You will need to reboot after an enable or disable, but should be better than having to install/uninstall.

The tool is linked off this knowledgebase article:

http://kb.displaylink.com/368

Thanks

Wim

Thank you very much for this new utility.

I works very well for me !

It's still present in 7.7.

No surprise.

Why do I even bother hoping that each new version will fix a critical bug that has existed for at least 2 years now?

Is there any news on a fix for this?

If it helps at all, right clicking any game and putting it in compatibility mode (for any operating system) seems to fix most games. I have yet to come across one that this doesn't work for and i've played hundreds of different games. Would be really nice to not have to do this everytime I install a game though (especially since I have to navigate to the steam folder and do it to the game executable for all steam games).