Large latency on monitors when using DisplayLink USB docking station

flut1 · 02-19-2019, 02:26 PM

I'm having latency issues with my monitors hooked up to a DisplayLink certified USB dock. It's most noticeable when I play video, especially HD video on YouTube. However, the issue is also present in other applications. For example, my IDE (programming editor) is much slower to respond to input, and scrolling is laggy.

This is the hardware I'm using:

Docking Station: DK30A2DH Startech Dual-4K Docking Station
Monitors: 2x LG 27UD59-B
Laptop: Lenovo Yoga 900 13isk - 80MK
OS: Windows 10 Pro (64-Bit)

Some interesting observations:

Once I drag applications from my external monitors to my laptop monitor, they run smoothly. I can even put half of the window on my external monitor, and half on the internal. The internal half will run smoothly, while the other half lags.
My mouse pointer always seems very responsive, even over a laggy application

Here are the steps I tried, all of which didn't seem to help enough:

Followed steps here: https://www.displaylink.org/forum/showthread.php?t=896
Followed steps here: https://support.displaylink.com/know...rticles/544264
Lowered resolution of each screen
Lowered refresh rate to 30hz
Only connect a single monitor
Disable hardware acceleration in Chrome
Enable/disable Intel DPTF in bios
Connect monitors over HDMI rather than DisplayPort
Connect dock over a USB 3.0 port rather than a USB C port

Attached are the logs from the DisplayLink windows support tool.

flut1 · 02-21-2019, 10:53 AM

Upon further investigation it seems that the main issue is that WUDFHost.exe is often taking up a lot of CPU. This is where the monitor starts to lag. When idle, the picture seems relatively responsive to input and it takes up about 5 - 10% of my CPU. However, under some workloads, especially video, it maxes out my entire CPU.

flut1 · 02-23-2019, 10:51 AM

Some more info on the CPU usage:

- I removed "Lenovo Quick Optimizer". This helped a lot
- The biggest issue is with applications that use some kind of hardware acceleration on the GPU. In some applications you can turn this off, but unfortunately in most you cannot.

02-21-2019, 10:53 AM	#2
flut1 Junior Member Join Date: Feb 2019 Posts: 4	Upon further investigation it seems that the main issue is that WUDFHost.exe is often taking up a lot of CPU. This is where the monitor starts to lag. When idle, the picture seems relatively responsive to input and it takes up about 5 - 10% of my CPU. However, under some workloads, especially video, it maxes out my entire CPU.

02-23-2019, 10:51 AM	#3
flut1 Junior Member Join Date: Feb 2019 Posts: 4	Some more info on the CPU usage: - I removed "Lenovo Quick Optimizer". This helped a lot - The biggest issue is with applications that use some kind of hardware acceleration on the GPU. In some applications you can turn this off, but unfortunately in most you cannot.