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One Video Card, 12 Monitors
Jamie found a story that might make your jaw drop if you happen to have some need to put 12 video cards in your machine. Although if that isn't enough, you can always install two of these. I don't think I'm kidding.
Once you go past a three screen Eyefinity setup, Bezels become a real serious problem. With three displays it's no big deal, since the center monitor serves as your primary view while the other two monitors expand your peripheral vision...but with 6 monitors, you will have bezels crossing the center of your point of view, making things real wonky.
Yes, it's awesome having the size, but until someone releases a bezel-less six monitor system, it's kind of a waste of time. Besides, with how much a six monitor setup would cost, you may as well buy a good quality projector.
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Realistically how many different displays can the average consumer use at a time? Gamers might want 3 or 4 and then they are landscaping them so that they can see left, center, and right. Given that and the cost (both monetary and performance) of adding more displays to a card, means that I think 2 is about right. For specialized applications like store displays, etc, more displays is better but it is not a high volume market.
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Hasn't Matrox been producing multi-output cards for years? How is this any different? http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/
I haven't really checked modern chipsets, but some older nvidia models definitely had a performance drop.
My preferred setup is one larger horizontal display for environments which require directx/opengl. That is paired with a second vertical display which usually has non-interactive statistic and monitoring applications running.
There was a significant drop in performance regarding the accelerated output and unless there is a specific chip driving each display I suspect this will always be true. However, given the advancement of video controllers today it will likely be less of an impact as performance increases. Specifically, I don't recall noticing an impact on my now defunct GT 290. However, being defunct and sitting on my coffee table I can no longer confirm.
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As a person more or less forced to use two at work, I hate it with a vengeance because it's all one big virtual desktop because of citrix and every application feels like popping up dialogs across the middle. Three would be infinitely much better than two, at least there no "#%5%%%#"# bar dead center. I know you can do that with a regular Radeon 5xxx if you have DP displays or an active converter, but I'd love to see it become standard like double DVI ports have been for a while.
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Sounds a lot like unix/linux to me.....
Thing is I don't think you'd have any real gain over a thin client/server kind of model, and there's no possibility for scaling or redundancy with something like this.
So it is going to cost you a good bit to get a system with this. You have to have a reasonably powerful computer, of course, which you'd need with a server as well but then there's the card, which is not cheap. A regular 5970 is $600-800 depending on configuration, this one will easily break a grand I'm sure.
Because of that you'd save little, if any, money over cheap systems acting as thin clients (or dedicated thin client hardware) and a server.
The only advantage I can see is the 3D support. However, with 12 monitors, the card is going to be extremely heavily taxed if you are trying to do 3D on all of them. You won't get all that high a performance.
Now a thin client/server model has several advantages over the single system. For one, you can scale it easily. If clients aren't using the system much you can add more until it is loaded. There's no hard limit. Likewise servers can be added fairly transparent to the clients. Then there's the possibility for redundancy. You can have a group of servers on the back end and if one fails, there's no outage. With a multi-display system, a system failure takes out all the nodes it was running. Finally there's a placement advantage. DP has a fairly short range so all your nodes will be within a few meters of the system. With a client/server system you can have them pretty much anywhere, ethernet goes 100m per cable and switches can repeat it as necessary.
So I think that's why you don't see much interest for this sort of thing. If people want shared processing resources, having it on a server makes sense. If people want dedicated processing resources, well then they aren't going to want others on it.
Back in the day, we had 30+ users on a PDP-11/70, with good response. Now you have a machine 3000X faster, and have problems supporting a single user. Aren't advances in technology amazing?
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you capture so much of a webpage you are usually peering at through a slit you are constantly scrolling through with lots of unused screen real estate on either side
Your eyes are aligned horizontally. Your vertical FOV angle is limited. With your 9:16 setup you have to actually move your eyes up and down. With a 16:9 setup you can keep looking at the same "slit" (hurr hurr) while you scroll the content past it.
Seems to me the only advantage your setup has is that you can get a better overview of a long page. But you couldn't read any of it because, to take it all in, you'd have to move too far away to read any.
THat is an amazingly odd way to try and squeeze more simultaneous users out of one box. FIrst you take a four or six core CPU, add an ungodly-expensive video card, and then (I assume) a couple dozen USB ports for keyboards/mice THEN you get to write the glue software to make it all work together.
Exactly how would this be more useful than a dozen Atom-based systems at $200/each (plus monitors/keyboards/mice, common requirement for either your solution or mine)? Assuming the appropriate software exists (and I don't think it does), if the main unit goes down, all 12 users are SOL, but with my RAIPC (Redundant Array of Inexpensive PCs) you can keep working until all 12 systems go down!
Ken
Be sure to factor in the thrust generated by the extremely powerful cooling fan - you wouldn't want your box taking off...
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