This is just too good to be true. Matrox has unleased a card that supports 4 (count ‘em: 1, 2, 3, 4) monitors. And yes, I said CARD. Singular. As in…ONE.
- Native x16 PCI Express support
- Support for up to 4 digital or analog monitors at a time
- 128 MB graphics memory
- Dual 400 MHz RAMDACs
- Matrox UltraSharp Display Output Technology
- Maximum resolution per display: 1600 x 1200
- Support for portrait (tall) resolutions and display pivoting
How about seeing someone’s reaction to “my resolution is 6400 x 1000″.
STB Systems was making multi-monitor cards back in the early 90′s. They had something called the “MVP” line of cards, one was a 2-monitor card and another was a 4-monitor card. You could also put multiple cards in the same PC, so you could have up to 4 MVP-4′s, for a total of 16-monitors hooked to one PC. These cards were pretty pricy, something on the neighborhood of $4000 for the MVP-4, and about $2500 for the MVP-2. The typical buyers of these cards were airlines, for displaying flight information on multiple screens, and stock brokers, for displaying information about a bunch of stocks at the same time.
Matrox has had 4 monitor cards for a very long time. They’re single cards with 4 GPUs. You can configure them 2 up/2 down, 4 side-by-side, 4 on top of each other, or just 4 copies of the same thing. They’re mostly used for the sorts of business knight referred to above, but also for things like autocad and the like.