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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.
I think a 4 or 6 core CPU could support 12 users in many cases. I could see building a computer lab at a school this way to minimize administrative burden. But it's too bad multi-seat linux doesn't work better. I have struggled with it on and off over the years, and it just doesn't seem to have critical mass of interest to gain real distro support.
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.
Living With a Nerd
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The summary is poorly worded. ATI's Powercolor HD5970 video card supports 12 display outputs. If you have two, you go up to 24 display outputs. At that point, you could monitor the whole of the matrix.
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.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
IMHO - you will never come close to having a paperless office until the screen real estate comes at least close to (or over) the desk real estate.
I write articles and code - and find that having the reference stuff up at the same time on another screen, with graphics on another, makes writing a LOT faster!!!
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
Indeed. The summary and title were so at odds... I had to RTFA!
...I'll be in the corner of shame.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Would this card drive one dozen monitors set up as digital picture frames?
I have a linux based file server in the basement that does not really do anything with its video output.
If I could hook up 12 picture frame monitors in various rooms of my house, that would be fun.
I don't want the extreme headache of manually updating 12 SDHC or CF cards. I don't want 12 individual stupid yearly subscriptions to some internet ripoff company that'll probably go out of business and make my investment obsolete the week after I buy them.
I just want to drop .jpgs into certain folders on my pre-existing file server and have the pictures randomly displayed thru the house, shuffling perhaps every 10 minutes. Also I'll have certain webcams periodically downloaded and added to the mix. And a cron job to display certain pictures at certain times, etc. A couple lines of perl, bash, and wget, thats what I'm talking about.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Like this one? It supports 4-way CrossFire (or SLI), and has enough PCIe x16 slots to cope with three of these cards.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16824255011
each is 1920x1200
i put one in landscape mode, then i bought an articulating monitor arm, and i put the other one in portrait mode. the setup looks schizophrenic, but listen up folks:
browsing the internet on a 16:9 monitor in portrait mode is a dream
try it some day. 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
as a web developer, it helps too, believe me: the landscape mode screen for code/ packet inspection/ debugging/ email, etc... the other screen for a really good 10,000 foot overview of what you are actually putting up in the browser in terms of page layout
trust me folks: get a 16:9 monitor and put it in portrait mode if you browse a lot on the internet. it is about as good as it gets in terms of ui experience
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but mine is vertical and erect while yours is horizontal and flaccid
so my equipment is superior, at least that's what your mom and your girlfriend always tell me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it