Does any current workstation class graphics card support four monitors with RHEL 5?

Question

I currently use a RHEL 5 workstation with a pair of Nvidia Quadro graphics cards, feeding four WUXGA (1920x1200) monitors. Unfortunately, using Xinerama to get a single X desktop means loosing much of the hardware acceleration these cards could provide.

Another machine here with quad monitors has two X desktops, with two monitors on each. Using two X desktops means that all monitors are hardware accelerated, but it also means that you can't drag windows between monitors that are on different graphics cards.

We did hope that using a dual GPU card like the Nvidia Quadro Nvs 450 would solve our problem, but it turns out that as far as X is concerned, two GPU's on one card is treated the same as having two graphics cards, triggering the same problem.

I believe that Eye-finity on the AMD FirePro workstation graphics cards would allow us to use a single four monitor X display, but we are almost exclusively an Nvidia shop, so I'm reticent to suggest this. Also, while I can see a number of people claiming to have triple monitor set-up working with RHEL 5, I can't find anyone claiming to have quad monitor setup working and AMD technical support are being less than helpful.

I have been assured by Matrox technical support that their M9140 and M9148 cards but again, I can't find anyone on the web who can confirm it.

• Can anyone confirm whether Eye-finity supports 4 monitors on a single X display without Xinerama on RHEL 5?
• Can anyone confirm whether the Matrox M9140 & M9148 quad display graphics cards support 4 monitors on a single X display without Xinerama on RHEL 5?
• Alternatively, can anyone suggest any alternatives which might allow a RHEL 5 workstation to support 4 monitors with hardware OpenGL acceleration on all screens?

Incidentally I know about Matrox DualHead to Go,but have dismissed that as an option since we would end up with two 3840x1200 or 1920x2400 virtual monitors, where maximising a window would maximise over two monitors - we would prefer maximised windows to be constrained to the monitor they were on.

Answer 1

Incidentally, I do have access to a workstation equipped with Eye-finity adapter and installed with RHEL5.5. It seems to have too old version of xrandr X.org extension which does not work with Eye-finity very well. I am able to use any two monitors together in Xinerama setup but not all of them.

Answer 2

xdmx + chromium proxies glx requests even to networked presentation wall...

I have two displays (one screen other HDMI) without using xinerama. Sort of xrandr works for me very well (allowing to switch second display on and off – something unimaginable with 20 years old Xinerama)

Xdmx and chromium are acceleration proxies to allow panoramic 4-screen Quake 3 etc where normal xrandr would give up.

Answer 3

With NVidia cards and NVidia's proprietary driver, you could also try NVidia's own "TwinView" feature. It kind of stretches one Xserver over all monitors, as long as these are on NVidia cards and having the same resolution/framerate.

We did not have the luxury yet to test it with more than two monitors, but for those, it worked like a charm. And as it it remains one single X server, dragging windows all over the screens is no problem.

Read /usr/share/doc/packages/x11-video-nvidiaG02/html/configtwinview.html for details, but in essence, it is eg.

  Option "TwinView"
  Option "MetaModes" "1680x1050, 1680x1050"

in xorg.conf's Device section.

Hth