Feedback about driver v3.0 beta
 

Dear forum,

Can I ask about your feedback on the v3.0 beta we have just released?
http://www.displaylink.com/downloads/osx

In this release we've worked on improving performance and in particular latency. Moving windows around should feel much more natural.

How is it working for you?

Thank you!
Carlo

Hi Carlo,

Just installed 3.0 Beta. Already it is somewhat improved with macOS Sierra.
The frame rate is very good, but when moving a Chrome browser window into my DisplayLink monitor to type this reply I still see black areas on the page and it is very slow to initially refresh the window.
Oddly if I move my mouse pointer through the black areas it rubs out the black (following the mouse trail) to reveal the rest of the window below.
Clicking again on the top bar of the window causes it to correctly refresh instantly, but only if you first click on something inside the window or switch between Chrome tabs on that window. Looks like an easy fix in there somewhere.

It's great to be able to use this monitor again almost like pre-Sierra OSX. Almost there!

David

macOS Sierra 10.12.1
Mac mini (Late 2012)

Carlo, latency does seem noticeably improved - moving the mouse cursor and windows around is much better.

I have an issue though where if I have the DisplayLink box (Dell D3100) plugged in for cold boot, the DisplayLink screens initialise correctly for the login screen but then once I've logged in may quickly freeze (requiring a reboot), is that something you've seen before?

Just updated to the 3.0 beta. Everything appears to be working OK. I have 2 displays now in my "normal" setup using DisplayLink in addition to the 28" Thunderbolt connected display, for a total of 4 displays. I am anxiously awaiting macOS Sierra 10.12.2 that is reputed to fix the black areas when moving windows.

I will update you if I see anything odd.

Much improved
 

MacOS 10.11, on MacBook Air 11" late 2012.
This build is working *very* well for me.
In fact it's working about as well as it's ever worked in the three years I've been relying on DisplayLink for external displays -- which has been very good at times, if a bit disappointing at others.
The mouse cursor and dragged windows no longer feels like they're on 30fps screens when they're on my DisplayLink-driven displays.
Only TextWrangler is laggy when one of its windows straddles a monitor boundary, but that's nothing new.
Well done!

Thank you all for the feedback,

Keep it coming!

Is anyone using 2560x1440 or 4K screens with DisplayLink? These are the hardest and it would be great to hear your impressions.

A few answers.
For HappySundays the black window or lack of refresh is an OS defect that Apple fixed in the 10.12.2 betas, we're all eagerly waiting for it to be released.

For shad0wca7 can you please send me the logs just after the reboot when that happens? I think you should be able to send me a private message here on the forum.
I'm sure you already have tried it, but in case please try to recover first by unplugging the DisplayLink device.

Best regards,
Carlo

Using a 90° rotation I have a 1080x2560 resolution, plus a 1080p monitor, both with DisplayLink beta driver. I compare against a not rotated 2580x1080 Displayport Screen connected to a MacBook Air.

In Safari (Version 10.0.1 ) I sometimes get fragmented dark grey background toolbars and cannot read my bookmark's names. This also happens with the Mail app. Doesn't happen in Chrome (Version 54.0.2840.98 (64-bit)).

Performance is quite good.

I've been using a Dell D3100 on a MacBook Air (early 2014) for about two weeks. I have three Dell U2515H displays hooked up at 2560x1440. One is connected directly to the Thunderbolt 2 port and the others to the dock (DisplayPort and HDMI - unfortunately I'm only getting 50Hz on the HDMI).
With 2.6 on Sierra I was quite disappointed and even considered going back to my Lenovo PC, but with 3.0b1 I have my hopes up! Performance is considerably better, although I still find it unacceptable in the long run.
"WindowServer" and "DisplayLinkManager" are still hogging my CPU, mouse movement is laggy and the display I use for coding in Sublime Text also lags. I find myself moving important windows to the TB display where performance is excellent.

I haven't had any crashes, but I see the occasional black windows and other graphical glitches. That doesn't bother me that much though - performance is the most important.

I have enabled "Reduce motion" and "Reduce transparency". Is there anything else that can optimize performance?

That's just my 2 cents - let me know if I can contribute in any other way! :)

I have two 2560x1600 screens. One is on displaylink. With the 3.0b1 driver and "reduce transparencies" checked it works fairly well however when a window is moved/dragged on top of another window the underlying window content is erased and not refreshed.

For example- when using the "preview" app a window on top of another window when moved will cause the underlying window to erase its content to white and it remains erased until I click on the underlying window which then refreshes the display content of that window.

This lack of refresh occurs with all apps on the displaylink screen.

I'm using an asus mb169b+ (1920x1080), MacOS Sierra 10.12.1 with the latest 3.0 beta:

1) The display lag is virtually non existent, which is quite different from when I unboxed the product and used Asus's drivers.

2) However, I am also having the redraw/artifact problem, where it doesn't seem like things on the screen are updating (symptom - I drag a window across to the attached screen, about halfway through this action it turns completely black, when I stop and drag the mouse cursor across the screen, it updates in places where the mouse cursor moves to).

I think a step in the right direction (the previous drivers were simply unusable), but because of the redraw problem it's still practically unusable for me.