Quote:
Originally Posted by Fektoer
I'll add my two cents.
With the latest drivers:
Final Fantasy XIV won't work in full screen (directx error)
League of Legends won't work at all (directx error)
On top of it all, the applications that do work -all- suffer from severe fps drops at irregular intervals. The application would run fine for a while on 59-60 fps until it suddenly drops to an unplayable 6-7 fps for a few minutes after which it will go back to normal fps. Rince and repeat. This happens with windows 7, windows 8, windows 8.1. With the dock connected ánd the dock unplugged. With extended display, projected display, non projected display.
Also, even when it's working 'fine' the displaymanager service hogs up an insane amount of cpu power. On my laptop with an i7-4771 processor, 16 gig of internal memory, nvidia 7500m gfx card, simply moving my internet explorer window around will use 40-50% (!!) of cpu capacity.
I uninstalled everything that had displaylink in the name and now all my applications show a noticable fps improvement, i can play my games fullscreen on a projected display, no more fps drops and moving my windows around won't use half of my cpu.
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I'm not an expert, but I believe the DisplayLink software essentially works by emulating a graphics renderer entirely in software. This is why you see such a large CPU spike as it scrambles to update its virtual framebuffer.
I don't know enough to know how well this can be optimised, I'd like to think that it could be little more than a blitting operation between the actual graphics card's framebuffer and the displaylink one but that's above my level of knowledge. Ideally, they'd utilise the graphics hardware itself to do all of this and maybe they do, but there certainly seems to be room for improvement.
In any case, it seems their implimentation isn't complete and certain operations (such as fullscreen directX) cause their driver to fall over somewhat. It would be nice if they could disable the displaylink stuff when the dock is not in use, for a start.