Some games cannot go fullscreen

[JakubDabrowski]

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us on the forum.

I have few questions to clarify this case even more.

1. Did you test other games in fullscreen or only CS:GO? If not, please verify that.
2. What resolution are you using in CS:GO? It seems like your monitor should be working in Full HD. Please also check other resolutions if they impact the screen in any way.

Thank you for your feedback.

Best regards,
Jakub

[Bo$s]

Thanks for the reply!

1. Did you test other games in fullscreen or only CS:GO? If not, please verify that.

I tried: Dark Souls 3, Dishonored 2, Hitman, Mafia 3, Worms Armageddon - for all of these game launched with no issues.

2. What resolution are you using in CS:GO? It seems like your monitor should be working in Full HD. Please also check other resolutions if they impact the screen in any way.

Full HD. I tried 1024x768 - I got a black screen instead of a frozen desktop.

[JakubDabrowski]

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

I have been looking into CS:GO display settings and I have found that there is an option under Display mode called: Fullscreen Windowed. As you mentioned you had some problems in this mode but when I checked it the game works perfectly fine for me. I have also checked the FPS ratio in the menu and while playing. I have reached nearly maximum which was set by the commands in console.

Please remember that in CS:GO you can set by commands a maximum number of fps which will be better than having always a maximum possible at a time.

Could you please verify if you are also having lags or fps issues in this mode? As it looks pretty stable for me and the issue comes from CS:GO that bypasess DWM probably for gaming preferences. It appears to me as this is the only possible explanation of such behaviour based on other games that works well for you.

Thank you for checking that and letting me know if that changes anything for you.

Best regards,
Jakub

[Bo$s]

I tried the Fullscreen Windowed mode - after a few minutes, I noticed screen stuttering and frames (not the frame rate) dropping, especially when I was moving quickly my mouse (and it doesn't matter how was the display connected - in both cases I had a noticeable worse gameplay experience in Fullscreen Windowed mode). Therefore, as a workaround, I prefer reconnecting the display when I want to play CS:GO, however, that's not the solution which I was looking for when I bought that station (and I wouldn't choose it if I had known that it does some magic with virtual Display Adaptors to support multiple displays in higher resolutions, as to me it brings only problems instead of benefits).

The one thing which confuses me a lot is that everything works fine when the screen is duplicated on both displays. This means that there is a way to have the game working correctly when the display is connected to the dock. I would love to see an experimental driver option that disables/bypasses the virtual display adaptor and let me use dock HDMI in the same way as the notebook HDMI works.

[JakubDabrowski]

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

We have done some more testing and on another machine we were able to reproduce the issue.

It seems like there is a problem with amount of frames that are being projected by CS:GO. In a Fullscreen windowed mode with an external display set as a primary one and on extend option. The game launched correctly but in-game experience was not satisfactory enough unless we lowered the amount of maximum FPS.

Firstly, we tried with highest possible and we did see the lags and stuttering BUT when we capped the FPS for 60 it was not present and the game played smoothly. We did try to increase the capped FPS and up to around 120 we did not see any changed. Around 200fps the game started to work really slowly.

This would also prove that other games can work normally as the ones you mentioned are capped for around 60fps.

What I would suggest for now is to lower and cap the FPS ratio in CS:GO as it seems to be an issue that the device is not able to project so many frames at once. If you would need a guide how to do it, here is the YT clip about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbTPNvbg228

Lastly, I would like to analyze the issue further. Could you please follow this link and gather log files for me? https://support.displaylink.com/know...to-displaylink

I would like to see your exact setup and possible errors or information in the logs.

[Bo$s]

Thank you for your help I tried setting fps_max to:

• 999 - this was my original setting - the game runs smoothly, but I experience frame dropping during fast mouse movement.
• 120 - the effect was similar to one with setting above but stronger
• 60 - the overall experience was much worse, I felt like playing in 20 fps (which is kind of funny, as other games running ~40fps don't have such issue, it may be somehow related specifically to CS:GO)

Please find below logs attached, gathered with the following steps:

1. Changed the CS:GO configuration to use Fullscreen mode
2. Connected External Display to the dock
3. Started Support Tool, Checked System Compatibility
4. Enabled Advanced DisplayLink Logging
5. Clicked Reset to clear old logs
6. Started CS:GO, the screen has frozen like usual
7. Exited CS:GO after a while
8. Gathered Support Information

[JakubDabrowski]

Hello,

Thank you for your fast replies.

I have been doing some more testing recently on a Dual GPU machine. As I assumed the pixel encoding is being done by the Intel GPU while the game renders from nVidia GPU.

Due to the nature of DisplayLink technology, we currently do use some CPU or GPU resource to encode the pixels, this is then sent to the dock to decode and display on screen , while this can be used for gaming, we do not recommend for fast paced action.

I have then changed the encoding for CPU to see if this will help in the overall gaming experience. What have changed to me was the amount of GPU usage on Intel graphic card which allowed me to get a pretty smooth gameplay on a non-gaming laptop. Moreover I checked it in Fullscreen Windowed mode and capped the FPS to maximum of 90 -> it allowed me to play without lags or FPS drops on a pretty weak non-gaming laptop.

Settings used on my testing:

- Full HD resolution 1920x1080 on an external screen
- FPS capped to 90
- External monitor set as a main one (CS:GO on it)
- Extend mode used between laptop and external screen

What I would suggest right now for you is to change the encoding on the docking station with the following guide:

Please perform these actions with CS:GO closed.

1. Open Registry Editor on your Windows
2. Go to: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DisplayLink\C ore
3. Create a string called AlternativeEncoder (simply right click -> New -> String Value)
4. Set the value to false
5. Re-plug your docking station

A re-plug is needed for the changes to take effect. This will force the docking station to use CPU rather then Intel GPU to encode the pixels. As for CS:GO it should be all fine it will not be a good option to use in more demanding games with better graphics but a lower FPS (Dark Souls 3 for example). If you would like to use again GPU encoding, simply change the value to true.

Thank you for checking that and letting me know if that would help you in getting better in-game performance.

Kind regards,
Jakub