Can you name or link any specific hardware or software you're using? Last time I looked into how to run 2 monitors on my M1 Air I gave up after seeing $400 docks that seemed to have performance issues for some people.
It uses the 6950 DisplayLink chip, which can do 4K@60Hz.
It's 90 dollars and drives 2 screens.
Software is less good. I had to enable Rosetta2 to get the pkg to install. Then you have to boot to recovery mode to allow signed 3rd party drivers. And you get a creepy notice that someone is watching your screen, which is how the display driver works.
Performance is pretty good, just a bit laggy on mouse movement.
Is that because the screen generation is software based? I noticed that when using display link and couldn’t bare the input lag or worse the compression from moving a window too rapidly. Switched to a monitor with thunderbolt output and my coworkers thought I was being a diva.
My understand is that yes, the external displays are both rendered by the CPU and so there are lower frame rates and frames dropped which is a concern of mine since I am pushing this computer to its limits with some applications I run. I've heard that for casual use it isn't too noticeable.
Unfortunately I don't think the M1 Air supports TB daisy chaining unless you're ok with mirrored displays. I still can't decide if I want to ask my job for a new computer, a new dock, or new displays lol.
macOS doesn't support daisy chaining, and never has. You can't use daisy chaining with any Mac. It's weird, it's stupid, but it's true. That's the sole reason the dock market is so complicated.
Yeah, it's definitely not as good as native, but it's not bad. One other significant restriction for DisplayLink is that it's unable to display DRMed video content.
I was using a secondhand Dell D6000, hoping to connect one 4k monitor natively (dp alt mode) and the rest via DisplayLink. That didnt work, now I’m using cheap docks I bought for ~€50 secondhand from a company called i-Tec (have one at home and one at work).
The way I have it set up: the i-tec dock is connected to a regular USB-C hub (from Ugreen). The USB-C hub is also connected to a 4k monitor. This way I connect 1 cable to my Mac and get everything: power delivery, Ethernet, peripherals, 4k monitor running natively and 2 2K monitors running on displaylink. It is… perfect. I havent touched my desktop computer for about a year.
Basically it is better to use the Displaylink monitors for static content - running 4K video on a 4K monitor on Displaylink would probably take about 40% CPU on my M1 chip. So everything dynamic goes onto my native 4k monitor, whereas the Displaylink monitors have easier content - browsers, vscode, notes etc.
But like, I regularly also play video on my 2K displaylink monitors and honestly I never ran into issues, or noticed a difference. Just dont do this on 4k monitors I guess.
Sorry for the delay, still havent figured out a way to get notified about replies on HN.
Your solution seems like the best so far! I had not thought of doing a mix of native and DisplayLink outputs, that's definitely the best of both worlds.
Since I also don't get notified of replies I've been checking back on this comment in hopes that someone had a clever solution like yours. Thanks!
Glad to help! It's really good, especially considering how dirt cheap the M1 Macbook can be these days. It's what I recommend to most people around me shopping for a laptop.
