Hi there, New to the forums but have enjoyed L1 Techs since its inception. Howwver, with all the talk of KVM’s and similar hardware recently, I have pondered the titular question, especially as I arguably have a need for such a device.
I suppose my need is that I need to find a way to swap-over primary and secondary monitors from my desk to my Sim-rig, without the manual process of having to unplug and plug in the respective devices. I could leave them all plugged in, but ive had odd bugs with some games rendering on the wrong monitors, so i’d rather see if theres a hardware solution that may suit me.
For clarity, i know next to nothing about this realm of things, so please offer any advice in a kid-glove form.
I’ve used a setup similar to what you describe, I had good success using displayfisuon profiles to switch between groups of monitors. That’s a software solution, though.
that is just an HDMI or DisplyPort switch. warning though, if you are needing to do more than 1 input at the same time they get expensive quickly and head into the realm of professional studio gear.
you could get multiple single display switches and stack them, though i do not know if that would be convenient.
also, crappy switches are known to add delay. This doesnt matter to most people, Sim Racers are not most people though.
HDMI matrix switch.
Leave all of the usb active all the time.
Or
Microsoft multipoint server.
One computer with 8 heads. Each gets a usb hub and one or more display outputs.
Appreciate al the responses so far.
I assumed it was something Relatively simple, such as a DP/HDMI switcher, but i presumed it was best to check on the forum.
Preferably, It would be a DP1.4 switcher, as i very much like having frame-sync stuff on both my desk and Sim-rig gaming sessions. Blame iRacing & other devs for not doing their “homework”.
With regards to USB, the only devices i would probably have plugged into said switcher would be a basic Keyboard & mouse, as iRacing specifically really dislikes controllers being moved to different ports and things, resulting in having to remap all the inputs again and again and again and…
Anyway. i suppose i best do some homework of my own. Appreciate all the help to date.