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How is this a limitation with Windows even? I'm sure Windows can have more than 3 displays, so why does Nvidia have this restriction on either platform?
by jlgreco 13y ago
How is this a limitation with Windows even? I'm sure Windows can have more than 3 displays, so why does Nvidia have this restriction on either platform?
- anonymfus 13y agoBecause they sell "professional" Quadro/Tesla cards with this feature enabled at enormous prices.
- jlgreco 13y agoAaaah... so this probably is not about Linux vs. Windows, but rather actually about 'GeForce GTX 560 Ti' vs. Quadro. They aren't worried about driving people away from Windows, they are worried about cannibalizing Quadro sales. There is probably a lot of use cases for many monitors that don't really require Windows (perhaps pro power-users, like traders, who need lots of browser windows open at once), so they need to ensure that their premium cards retain their edge even on Linux. That makes much more sense.
- gizmo686 13y agoBut how many of those users would need to use NVIDIA's drivers? As I understand it, the benefit of NVIDIA's drivers over Noueveau is performance, not basic hardware support. If all you need is many monitors for web browsers, then you should not have a problem using Noueveau.
- jlgreco 13y ago> But how many of those users would need to use NVIDIA's drivers? That's a good point; I cannot say. Perhaps they think they are dealing with people who think 3D performance is necessary, or dealing with people (IT organizations?) that prefer 1st party drivers to hardware savings. I don't think Microsoft is really involved in this though.
- betterunix 13y agoI have some experience here. With Nouveau, XRandr works out of the box -- great if you have one card. With the proprietary driver, no such luck (last I checked). On the other hand, my workstation has two cards, and XRandr is not up to the task; it was back to Xinerama and playing with xorg.conf.
- gizmo686 13y agoI'm using the proprietary driver, it has had XRandr support for a while now.
- betterunix 13y agoAh, my information is a bit out of date (at least a year, maybe more?). Thanks.
- ginko 13y agoThis sort of logic completely baffles me. People buy hardware to use their advertised features. If you are the type of person that only needs 2D rendering and video then you should use an Intel GPU. I would assume people who buy a state-of-the-art dedicated GPU want to use them for actual 3D acceleration.
- thristian 13y agoOr possibly the advertised feature they're interested in is 'ridiculous number of attached monitors'. Intel GPUs generally only have a couple of display connectors; if you want a card with a lot of physical ports you'll want to buy a discrete GPU whether or not it support 3D acceleration.
- AUmrysh 13y agoEven some of the Quadro cards (Q2000m in my personal experience) won't do more than 3 displays, and to do that requires changing bios settings which make games unplayable for the most part.
- MichaelGG 13y agoYeah even Windows98 could run 9 displays. From the sound of it though, it looked like it was about presenting a single display to the OS across multiple GPUs. That's significantly different than Windows' built-in multi-display support. Think full-screen apps that call APIs that aren't going to work across screen boundaries.