A couple of months ago I wrote about setting up multiple monitors using DisplayLink technology on my MacBook Pro. At the time there was only a very basic set of beta drivers available for OS X. Even though the capabilities of those drivers left a lot to be desired things still worked pretty good.
Today DisplayLink released a new set of beta drivers for OS X. There are a large amount of bug fixes in this release but the most exciting addition is 2D acceleration. After playing around with the new drivers for a few minutes I can say there is a definite improvement.
One of my biggest issues with the previous drivers was the performance. It was poor enough that the monitor on the DisplayLink port would be used only for web browsing and displaying static information. With the updated drivers there is a definite improvement. It is still slower than the display connected via DVI but it is a lot more usable now.
Scrolling through a long web page, on a maxed out browser (1280×960) has a lot less lag. However, I did notice a new issue with the drivers. There is a bit of tearing near the far left edge. Not really that bad, probably about 10 pixel wide. Wiggling the whole browser window seems to fix the problem. It’s not bad but things aren’t perfect.
Another issue I had with the previous drivers was when I unplugged all the monitors a residual 1×1 pixel monitor would be left over. The worst part is that this breaks task switching with Apple+Tab. A reboot was the only way I could fix this.
Overall the new drivers have so far been a definite improvement over the previous beta drivers. Here’s looking forward to a 1.0 release! Great job DisplayLink!
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OK, the LATEST DisplayLink beta drivers for the Mac (as of July 2, 2009) still have some significant problems. On testing with several MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, we found:
1) It sometimes takes a couple of cycles of reboots of the projector and/or the Mac in order to get things working properly.
2) There is a weird anomaly in PowerPoint, such that if you use the built-in Presenter Tools to display your notes and slides on the laptop, while sending the main presentation to the projector, the projected image is fine, but the display on the laptop bizarrely shifts the ‘current slide’ display downscreen by about 1/2 a screen height, which covers your notes.
3) There is an even weirder anomaly in Keynote, such that it simply won’t work with the USB connection. Trying to do in two-screen mode gives you a bogus error message about not having enough VRAM, and trying to do it in mirror-mode shows the presentation on the laptop, but completely blanks out the projector.
This is all very frustrating, because it has lots of potential…and we all know that Mac users make the best presenters… ;-)