I am getting my UD-6950H soon and looking forward to getting my system running two HDMI displays. How will connecting both displays to the station affect my CPU’s performance? The laptop already has an HDMI port, will using one display here and one from the station provide the best performance?
This is an embedded software-dev machine right now, we have no graphics, video or high-cpu loads planned. A little MATLAB, maybe some SolidWorks when we get excited, not too much though this is really just a code dev machine if useful
Thanks for reaching out to us, I am happy to help!
The docking station’s DisplayLink software uses the CPU to compress and transmit the video signal from the computer to the docking station. Normally this will use a small percentage of the CPU time, depending on the processor in the system, this can generally be anywhere from 1-2% to 10-15%. For software development I would expect a fairly low CPU use from the displays connected to the docking station, and connecting both displays to the docking station should perform well for this task.
Using SolidWorks or other 2D/3D design software I recommend connecting your primary display to the computer’s HDMI output if the performance on the docking station is not satisfactory. USB 3.0 does not provide enough bandwidth to drive the display normally, to get around this the DisplayLink software only sends the changes from the last frame to the current frame to the docking station, the changes are applied to the last frame and then displayed on the monitor. Fewer changed pixels take less bandwidth than larger changes, for example, printing text to the screen will take very little bandwidth while zooming in on a full screen image will require refreshing almost every pixel on the display and may use the full USB 3.0 bandwidth creating a choppy image. Additionally the DisplayLink software only supports a limited subset of low level graphics acceleration and my not work well with the SolidWorks software.
Please let me know if this helps, or if you have any additional questions.
Pat the detail you share here is great, thank you. Learning that the system only transmits screen changes is key for me, most of my work is static in code dev!
With this I will go ahead and install with both monitors connected, give it a week and see the performance results. I will share my results when completed with the test, thank you much Pat!!