Feedback about driver v3.0 beta 2

[phrogg]

Originally Posted by Carlo

Hi thank you,

We're struggling to reproduce what is shown in the excellent video from luckman212 or any sort of window-over-window corruption.
Unless it's a mirroring setup of course, in mirror we can easily see similar issues, which are a problem introduced in macOS some time ago.

Are you using mirror? If not any specific setting maybe in Accessibility/Display?

One check you may want to do is to take a screenshot of the whole desktop when the issue is visible. Is the corruption visible also on the screenshot?

Best regards,
Carlo

I have the same settings in my Accessibility and Display as luckman showed. But I'm on 2 4K displays, one native on the multi-adapter on a Macbook, the other through the USB port.

I took screenshots and I find that it doesn't show the artifacts when I do that. Both when I do that as a full screen shot and when I grab a portion of the screen. Interestingly, when I grab the portion of the screen with Shift-Cmd-4 it actually whites out both of the finder windows as I travel over them while leaving the background normal. But in the image that is grabbed they show what is there.

So I have created a quickie video you can view to see what I'm seeing. I can do this in a higher resolution if you want but low res allowed doing this upload very quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBkdXS-q16A

Phrogg

[justme]

unfortunately beta 2 did not fix the problems i'm seeing.

the lower 2/3 of the desktop background of the displaylink scree are still white and the shadows erasing the contents behind to white is also still happening.

[Carlo]

Thank you for the information. It is really useful indeed.

We found what the trigger is (thanks to Christian from the team here, good he's around this week!).
To see all these issues you have to disable "Displays have separate Spaces" in the Mission Control system preference.

In all cases it looks like the contents we receive are corrupted but I can confirm Phrogg's finding that taking a screen shot forces the rendering of some contents so those corruptions won't be captured.
A quick test in 10.11 shows this is another regression in Sierra, unsure if something introduced in a minor update. We'll open a bug with Apple immediately.

As for the other defects already fixed in 10.12.1 and 10.12.2, the priority of this issue can be raised by opening more bugs with Apple at bugreporter.apple.com
We'd be grateful if you could open bugs there as well.

In the meantime you may want to enable separate spaces, currently the default setting in macOS. You won't be able to show windows across displays but there are quite a few advantages.

Thank you again for the feedback, keep it coming!

Best regards,
Carlo

[luckman212]

Originally Posted by Carlo

We found what the trigger is [...] To see all these issues you have to disable "Displays have separate Spaces" in the Mission Control system preference.

That is great to hear!

We'll open a bug with Apple immediately. As for the other defects already fixed in 10.12.1 and 10.12.2, the priority of this issue can be raised by opening more bugs with Apple at bugreporter.apple.com. We'd be grateful if you could open bugs there as well.

Would be happy to open a case, but could you guys post somewhere the details or wording that you'd like us to use, so we can be sure all of the cases are linked together properly to generate the higher priority?

you may want to enable separate spaces, currently the default setting in macOS. You won't be able to show windows across displays but there are quite a few advantages.

I haven't tried in a while but I remember not liking this setting when I first encountered it. What are some of those advantages?

[Carlo]

Originally Posted by luckman212

That is great to hear!

Would be happy to open a case, but could you guys post somewhere the details or wording that you'd like us to use, so we can be sure all of the cases are linked together properly to generate the higher priority?

I haven't tried in a while but I remember not liking this setting when I first encountered it. What are some of those advantages?

Hi luckman,

About the separate spaces bug simply describe the issue as you see it, attach your system profile and mention our own bug ID: 29825934

Off the top of my head some advantages of the separate spaces:
- Menu bar on all screens
- Full screen video on one screen does not blank all others
- Easier to keep all window contents in one screen

I'm sure the are advantages to the Spaces feature but I'm not using it enough to notice really. Maybe others can share their impressions.

Regards,
Carlo

[phrogg]

So I switched that preference and it makes the second screen really work pretty well! Overall I like that configuration and I'm not sure how I ended up with that choice turned off!

So things are much better in most respects. The one other issue I have been having is still there and finally got me to just pull the plug on that DL monitor.

I am apparently losing sync with it constantly. It was occasionally but it just kept happening more and more often to where it is now 3-5 times per minute. Both screens blank, it resets all of the windows onto the monitor attached to the built-in graphics card, then it blanks again as it sees the second monitor and puts things back on the DL monitor. This now reoccurs maybe 3-5 times per minute and is making working infeasible.

I am hooked up with a Macbook into the AV adapter where I have one 4K monitor via HDMI and a USB 3 connection to a USB 3.0 hub. That hub has a hard drive (for backups) attached and the DL adapter for the second monitor.

I can drop the hub and backup drive out of the middle of this, but is there any known issue with doing this over the AV adapter on a Macbook?

[phrogg]

Originally Posted by phrogg

I can drop the hub and backup drive out of the middle of this, but is there any known issue with doing this over the AV adapter on a Macbook?

Well dropping the hub out of the middle sure didn't help .

It happens often enough I can probably catch it on video if you really want to see.

[luckman212]

Originally Posted by Carlo

some advantages of the separate spaces:
- Menu bar on all screens
- Full screen video on one screen does not blank all others
- Easier to keep all window contents in one screen

Thanks Carlo. To me having a menu bar on all screens is not really useful, plus it wastes some space. The rest of the features are good but for me, I noticed more crashes in WindowServer (or Finder? not sure which) when I had this option on. Mostly Finder would "freeze" and the menubar would start flickering very rapidly and I would get the spinning beach ball and have to force quit. For me having the option off is more stable, even though there is more artifacting as was seen in my video.

I will try to open a bugreport with Apple in the coming days and reference your bug 29825934

thanks.

[Alyson]

I recently got a docking station to use with my MacBook operating Sierra. I was using the driver 2.6 and it was working fine but with a little keyboard lag. One day it completely stopped working (nothing would show up on monitors when plugged in), so I upgraded to the new beta even though there was the warning against performance issues. I didn't seem to have a choice.

Now I am semi-operating but with some severe issues that make it so that most of the time I would rather just work from my laptop. Any advice on either of my major issues listed below? At this point I think I need to switch to another brand as this is majorly cutting into my work productivity...

1. SEVERE keyboard and mouse lag (wireless Logitech). Mouse lag seems to slightly improve if laptop is open instead of closed, but keyboard connection is very intermittent and sometimes will work fine then sometimes will not work for up to 3 minutes then come back fine.

2. 2nd monitor plugged into HDMI port is completely not available as a display (tried gather windows, detect displays, etc). This monitor was working fine before the beta update, and works fine if I plug into the DVI port with an adapter.

[rudders]

I've pretty much stopped using the displays on my Hub as the CPU impact was typically 50% on a MBP i7 (Previous model). Anyone else finding CPU consumption an issue.

Driving two DisplayPort Dell Monitors @ 1920 * 1080 and MBP @ Retina.