High Resolution Mode in HP Bios

[Rayman30]

I have been noticing that HP laptops have this "High Resolution Mode" setting in the BIOS, and the only way we have able to get more than 2 monitors working at full resolution at 60Hz off of a USB-C dock is to enable it. I read online that this disables USB3.0 support. My question is are these USB-C docks HP's are using with their newer models, are they entirely thunderbolt based? and are these limitations down to their simply not being enough CPU lanes to supply the bandwidth needed for it all?

I am just a little cloudy with how this works, any assistance would be much appreciated.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

This is down to being USB-C vs. Thunderbolt. Those docks are not the same. USB-C docks using USB 3.1 abide by the DisplayPort Alt Mode functionality, which means resolutions up to 4K@60Hz using 2 lanes. In DP Alt Mode to go above that resolution, 4 lanes need to be allocated, and to do that you allocate all the USB 3.1 lanes, and maintain the old USB 2.0 pins.

Thunderbolt does not allocate pins in the same way, rather the Thunderbolt Controller is taking in these signals and converting them to a PCIe signal for the controller On the other side of the link. That means all the signals (DP, PCIe, USB, etc) are all muxed and sent down the link, then de-muxed on the other side.