Holy cow, in the year 2026 I could have written the above post word for word, because I have had this exact same experience.
Working on a DAW on a Macbook M5 Max, running 2 external monitors through Thunderbolt to HDMI, absolutely no performance issues. Decide to upgrade my setup so I can have more passive USB devices/ethernet plugged in simultaneously, drop some cash, change to running those same monitors through my $160 WavLink DisplayLink, MASSIVE display/mouse lag when doing literally anything. I've heard the excuse "well, DisplayLink compresses information so it can be run through USB, so you have to be forgiving/not do CPU-intensive stuff while using it so it can work as intended"...but I was already connected to both external monitors through USB Thunderbolt? How in the world is it necessary to compress it further than that, and in a way that tanks performance so badly? Especially on such an intensely powerful machine? Genuinely if I were still in the return window I'd return this for my money back, what insanity.
Anna
Holy cow, in the year 2026 I could have written the above post word for word, because I have had this exact same experience.
Working on a DAW on a Macbook M5 Max, running 2 external monitors through Thunderbolt to HDMI, absolutely no performance issues. Decide to upgrade my setup so I can have more passive USB devices/ethernet plugged in simultaneously, drop some cash, change to running those same monitors through my $160 WavLink DisplayLink, MASSIVE display/mouse lag when doing literally anything. I've heard the excuse "well, DisplayLink compresses information so it can be run through USB, so you have to be forgiving/not do CPU-intensive stuff while using it so it can work as intended"...but I was already connected to both external monitors through USB Thunderbolt? How in the world is it necessary to compress it further than that, and in a way that tanks performance so badly? Especially on such an intensely powerful machine? Genuinely if I were still in the return window I'd return this for my money back, what insanity.