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I am looking for a solution, either Windows or Linux, that lets me hook up eight or nine monitors to a single PC and view (ideally hardware-accelerated) video spanning all eight monitors. The monitors would likely be fairly low-resolution; think 640 x 480. Still, 5120 x 480 is still a lot of pixels, hence the need for hardware acceleration.

I am not up to date on the differences in AMD/ATI and nVidia drivers. I understand that both support multiple monitors, but I understand that in the past, it was difficult to view movies spanned across multiple monitors. I do not know if this is still the case.

I'm also not sure if the best solution is to hook up three or four video cards, or if perhaps I should look to Matrox's TripleHead2Go solution with just one or two video cards.

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Recent AMD video cards support Eyefinity which maps multiple monitors to a single, logical monitor of aggregate resolution, which I believe is similar to the Matrox solution. nVidia's upcoming GF100 series also supports Surround which does the same thing.

However, Eyefinity only supports a maximum of six monitors (with two cards in CrossFire), and Surround is expected to initially support four monitors (with two cards in SLI).

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According to AMD (amd.com/us/Documents/Display_Configurations.pdf), this supports up to six monitors, but only in 3x2 mode. That would get me part of the way, but would still require two cards in 4x1, and I'm not sure AMD would allow video to play across all eight monitors. – ChrisInEdmonton Jan 22 '10 at 17:43
@Chris Yeah, I've updated the answer. I assume it's not possible in your case to just use fewer monitors, but with higher resolution? – sblair Jan 22 '10 at 18:03
Nope. I'm actually asking for a friend, but it's some sort of presentation thing. The actual setup involves eight monitors with fixed, and low, resolution. :( – ChrisInEdmonton Jan 22 '10 at 18:11
Also, there's no guarantee that it'll work with Eyefinity/Surround, but MaxiVista claims to be able to add virtual monitors (i.e. extra PCs/laptops), regardless of the number of physical monitors (maxivista.com/docs4/09/manual.htm#dual). – sblair Jan 22 '10 at 18:11
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This isn't going to cheap, but the people I know that run more than four monitors use Matrox cards.

For example, check out this puppy . . .

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/display_wall/mura_mpx_series/

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