Since installing the UD-3000 with my Surface Pro, the startup of most Metro (Start) Apps is slow, taking anywhere from 10 to 18 seconds to display content. This impacts any apps that pull data from the Internet (News, IE, Video, Games, etc.).
DisplayLink is aware as of March 10th 2013, and they claim to be working on it. Although one solution is to remove all of the drivers, there is a workaround that you can use in the meantime.
Changing one of the IE 10 advanced settings reduce the start time of these apps to less than 2 secs. Go to: Internet Options >> Advanced Tab >> Accelerated Graphics topic (1st one) >> Select Use Software Rendering instead of GPU* (*requires restart).
The impact on the CPU load seems negligible (looking at the Task Manager/Performance screen).
At least this will keep me going until the real fix is available.
We’re testing the next release of DisplayLink driver (version 7.2) and signs look good that this will be resolved. We’re expecting this release in early April. Thanks for your patience!
Hi Theo - Michael might have some other thoughts – but quite a few scenarios work better when using software rendering instead of GPU. Having your browser be a DirectX app (like a game) trips up on many special cases like USB graphics, remote desktop, older systems, etc. And the performance difference even on a GPU attached screen is subtle. GPU is a big jump mainly for webgl and other true 3D needs.
I think there’s a software developer coolness factor to “using the GPU” that drives these products to do it, when the gains are marginal and the losses have quite an impact. It’s frustrating in a way to have compatibility sacrificed for cool. Fortunately, there are settings to turn off the aggressive reliance on GPU.
Note that since I installed the drivers earlier today, I’ve had my Surface Pro crash twice when in sleep mode (or more accurately, when I’ve closed the Type Cover. In other words, when I tried to wake up the machine, it ended up booting from scratch and gave me the message about a critical error. I don’t know for sure that the two are related, but the driver was the only change I made today and I’ve never had the Surface crash like that before.
ok I tried this today. Metro apps screen definitely improved. 1-2 sec load up. haven’t seen the problem Tomi reported. but using Acer touchscreen. I would say still ever so slightly faster using software rendering rather than gpu . But not much in it. undecided which to use still. But thanks for the update.
No crashes for me (Surface Pro) when I upgraded. Tomi: I should add that the “crashes from sleep via the Type Cover” is a known Surface Pro issue (reported in the news two weeks ago) - which I experienced once myself.
Side benefit pf the upgrade is that the built-in Microsoft PDF viewer now also starts up quickly.
I also experienced slow wired ethernet performance, which I fixed by unplugging/plugging the plugable station, and therefore, unrelated to the patch. 3 days later, I can confirm that the new driver (7.2) is the way to go.
I drilled in deeper and the crashes I encountered weren’t related to the new driver. For some reason, VirtualBox was crashing the machine that day (and hasn’t since as these things tend to go).
