[LeEco Le Max 2 Questions & Answers] abufrejoval:
Miracast works surprisingly well but latency

I'm very sorry that HDMI and MHL are gone from today's smartphones, now that they have power enough to rival consoles and PCs.

But I haven't entirely given up on the console use case yet and tried the wireless variants.

First I went and installed AirServer, which emulates Apple's AirPlay, ChromeCast and Miracast protocols on Windows 10 PCs.

I tried first using a Braswell four core Atom as server (Intel N3700), because I thought it was a good match and has way more power than hardware dongles.

Turns out AirServer is evidently so badly programmed, the Braswell Atom just drowns (display latency can reach several seconds) and gets stuck.

Can't use Ethernet desktops with Mira-/Chromecast so I tried a Skywell notebook as AirServer next, a rare 28W TDP Core i5-6267U beast with Iris 550 Graphics and a hyperthreading CPU with 2.8GHz base clock (=tons of power).

That one at least didn't die with the software server, but lags and quality weren't really acceptable with both the Chromecast and Miracast protocols (little difference between them).

Bit the bullet and tried a Microsoft Mircast Dongle v2 ($60, not cheap and certainly far less power than those Intel CPUs, but highly optimized software).

The most positive surprise was that graphics performance didn't seem to suffer: 3D Mark with or without a Miracast clone display yielded idential FPS. That is especially astonishing, because it renders 1920x1080 on the external monitor and 2560x1440 on the internal display in parallel.

The negative aspect: Even if Microsoft's Miracast dongle doesn't drown, die or cost performance, there is noticeable latency, not compatible with most games.

It's ok for surfing, desktop apps or for playing movies on the big screen, but it's no replacement for a hardware video port (HDMI/MHL or similar).

Miracast has quality issues with pixel depth, I believe it's effectively using something like 16-bit graphics and my Android desktop background (a green Jungle) causes horrible compression artifacts on Miracast (noticed the same with Chromcast on AirServer).

I also tried using a DisplayLink adapter capable of USB 3 and 4K displays (on the PC at least), and that delivered far less latency, but the one I have is really designed for notebooks and a power hog: It will drain le Max in no time at all. A variant which acts as an externally powered USB-C docking station, may be able to do much better.

I was surprised to see that games work w/o issues with Displaylink on Android (on PCs Display Displaylink doesn't have 3D support, but the Android 3D frame buffer seems to always share main memory so sharing it is less problematic), can't quite remember if there was a huge performance drop. It also doesn't have reduced color depth nor the compression artifacts the wireless protocols have.

Summary: Using le Max 2 as VR headset, as PC desktop replacment, or as game console seems logical, given the power of the CPU, the GPU its abundance of RAM (6GB in mine) and its really fast storage (rivals "real" SSDs).

But in practice something always comes up short: Google has drawn a new VR baseline beyond le Max 2, latency free physical display ports are not available and the wireless alternatives add inacceptible latencies and reduce display quality.

Evidently vendors hate making consumers happy...