Hi, I'm Bernie Thompson.
I'm the Founder of Plugable Technologies.
You might've seen that Microsoft came out with their Windows 10 Anniversary Edition
on August 2nd.
Not everybody is getting this OS update automatically.
They're rolling it out over a period of a few weeks.
One of the interesting features in it, that's very relevant to us as Plugable is that Windows
10 Anniversary edition now has some new support for USB graphics that's different and in most
ways much better than anything that's been before on Windows.
So I wanted to explain that a little bit to everyone.
In the old days, back in Windows XP each graphics driver was pretty separate.
And, in fact, you could install a graphics driver from Intel, a graphics driver from
Nvidia, and a graphics driver from Plugable or DisplayLink side-by-side.
But with Windows Vista that shifted.
Because of the shift to the Display Window Manager architecture at a compositing desktop,
a bunch of limitations came in, and one of those was that you really could only have
one graphics driver on the system.
And that meant that certain things got very complicated to do.
For example, many of you might be familiar with hybrid graphics, where you have a low
power, low performance Intel GPU on your laptop, but then you also have a high performance
Nvidia one, and somehow the system's using both of those.
Well, guess what, starting with Vista that became very complicated.
In fact, they have a driver architecture that kind of hides the existence of the second
graphics processor from Windows, because if Windows knew it just wouldn't support it.
Well the same thing was happening over on the USB graphics side with DisplayLink.
DisplayLink had to basically develop a set of drivers that completely worked around the
way Windows did things in order to allow you to add three, four, five, six extra displays
over USB.
It worked great, but required kind of a Herculean effort on DisplayLink's part, and every time
your main GPU driver was updated and every time the operating system was updated there
was this risk that the DisplayLink drivers would break.
In fact, they did in many times, but DisplayLink is so good about their software development
and relatively quick about it, they were able to fix those things very quickly.
But none of this is the way things should be, because the role of the operating system
is to be this arbiter between this hardware, that might be changing, and you might have
many different types of hardware connected to your system, and the operating system and
make that all invisible to users and to applications.
So, through the whole cycle of Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Microsoft knew this was a problem,
but just couldn't get it on their schedule to support USB graphics in-box.
Now finally with Windows 10 Anniversary edition, there is support for USB graphics built-in
to Windows.
So what that means is you basically have a whole new DisplayLink driver that is simpler
in many ways and just makes use of the operating system to do a lot of the complicated things
and a lot of the interactions with the rest of the system.
Both Microsoft and DisplayLink have done a pretty good job at this, much better than
some prior things that may've happened.
For example, mirror cast is an example of something that was brought into the operating
system and really was hurt by that.
So DisplayLink hardware devices like those we sell here at Plugable are looking really
good.
The performance is good and the quality is good, but there are a few pro and con trade-offs.
One of the cons that we've noticed is if your primary GPU driver does not support a feature
called DWM clone, then you won't be able to clone displays over USB.
Whereas previously you could always at least clone one with the old DIsplayLink drivers.
Also, there may be problems just at the point of doing the Windows 10 Anniversary update,
because basically you're switching from a completely different old driver model to this
new kind of built into Windows driver model.
We've found that almost all of those issues are in fact solvable, sometimes with an uninstall,
reinstall, and we've put up a blog post, which we'll provide a link to into here, which kind
of goes through all of those things that we've found and how to solve them.
So, there you go!
Windows 10 Anniversary Update, rolling out over the next few weeks.
All of you out there who've been using multiple monitors over USB, and know how cool that
is, probably wondering "will it still work with Anniversary Update?"
Yes!
The support is built now into the OS, which is great.
Drivers to that new architecture on Windows update, which is great.
If you have any questions at all, we're happy to help.
Just email us at support@plugable.com.
Thanks!