Feedback about driver v3.0 beta 2

[Carlo]

Hi All,

The little elves at DisplayLink have been working hard and have delivered a new beta at http://www.displaylink.com/downloads/osx

The purpose of this beta has been to keep the performance improvements whilst removing the artefacts introduced in beta 1. In our testing it has behaved well so we think it's worthy of you attention.

The feedback we have received about beta 1 has been extremely useful to us. Please let us know what you think about this new version.

Kind regards and happy Christmas,
Carlo

[luckman212]

I installed 3.0b2 a couple days ago and it is definitely "better" but still not all the way there. I have a lot of artifacting still when doing simple operations. I made a video -- I think that's the easiest way to show some of the glitches:

https://vimeo.com/197186133

[phrogg]

So what I'm seeing is that the mouse artifacts have gone away but the artifacts from the windows or the icons are still there. If I take two finder windows and run them near each other, the shadow of the top window will white out the bottom one vs being translucent. And if I drag a window over the other it artifacts the bottom window.

But this doesn't happen 100% of the time. I can start dragging it across quickly but when I slow down or stay on the other window long enough it goes into that mode. And the top window blanks white usually at the same point.

But its enough that I'll try to run with that second monitor on for another few days and see if its usable.

[Khashoggi]

Still have the overlapping window refresh problem. Acute with finder desktop. Any window dragged over finder desktop erases desktop to white.

2560x1600 displays

[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

[luckman212]

Originally Posted by Carlo

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

Thanks, no I am not using mirroring. 3 independent displays: 2 native and 1 using a Plugable DisplayLink usb3 adapter. All 3 monitors are identical (Viewsonic VP2365wb) and running at 1920x1080 resolution. Nothing special in Accessibility, I do have "Reduce Transparency" turned on but I re-tested with it off and it did not make any difference on the corruption.

accessibilty control panel:


displays:

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?

Ok I did this and actually the corruption *is* in the screenshot, which is a little interesting (I didn't think it would be). Is there any other info I can send to help debug further? I attached the screenshot of the corrupt desktop.

[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

[paultzirides]

Performance, stability, and graphical glitches have been greatly improved from their baseline state in this release. I'm loving the progress the teams is making - it's a huge leap from the days of 2.x and brings DisplayLink up to a level at which I can recommend using it again with macOS.

Once I checked the "Displays have separate spaces" option, I saw a further improvement in performance and decrease in visual artifacts. I am so happy with the way this is working now. Great job guys - keep up the amazing work.

[saudor]

The new driver is improved. Maybe a notch faster. and transparency works well with it remaining on. However, it still significantly falls behind Duet Display where the experience is almost native. Not to mention that that one is passed over USB 2.0 connection (low bandwidth) and pushes a retina 2048x1536

What's interesting about DD is that they have an option of selecting either the dedicated GPU or the iGPU to process it.. which leads to me to think that there might be some kind of GPU acceleration involved. Now i dont know how DL does it but maybe DL can harness more of that power too. Comparing the two, the displaylink gobbles a ton of CPU while the DD does not go up as much for the same tasks

OS: El capitan 10.11.6