I was just digging through my junk closet, and found a pair of 15 inch CRT monitors. They look pretty good flanking my 17 inch LCD, so I've decided to try and set up a 3-head display.

However, the only video card I have, a GeForce 2 Ultra, only has one VGA and one SVideo output, and only one can be used at a time, it can't even mirror. The first card I though of to replace it was the Matrox Parhelia, but I read that it has almost no Linux support, so it is ruled out.

Can anyone recommend me a card, or set of cards, that would work well for this? The only requirement I have is that the resulting setup provides 3D acceleration across all 3 screens. I know that the Nvidia binary driver has something called "twinview", but I've never seen a 3-head Nvidia card and I get the impression that it doesn't work across cards.

The matrox parhelia does work, however 3D is only partially supported. I set up a 3-headed redhat 9 box with the 128M version. It works good for 2D apps. I got the drivers from matrox themselves.

I'm also looking for a high end 3d AGP card with 3+ heads. Preferable NVidia, their drivers seem to be the best supported. There are plenty of PCI based graphics cards that support 4 to 8 heads, but finding an AGP based one has been proven a challenge, regardless of OS.

What do you mean "partially" supported? Is it enough to run something like an opengl game?

Maybe, the opengl driver is way flakey. I say it is only partially supported, because Matrox has you fill out a questionare just to get the driver. There are also residual imaging left behind any windows that were running opengl.

Another big factor, the card is not that fast. Off a dual 3G Xeon, scsi-raid0 hd, 2Gig memory system the bottleneck is definately the card, with a glxgears score of 650 fps in default resolution. Another system of mine, (single AMD 2200+, 60G ide hd and 512M memory) running NVidia's drivers on a cheap little FX5200 were about 1300 fps.

My big delema is trying to get a single card to do 3 or more heads in AGP. The are at least a half dozen solutions with PCI, but it seems like a waste for my AGP slot.

Cheers and good luck

Hmm. In that case I might try something different. Another configuration that might work would be to use a dual head AGP card for two of the screens, and a PCI card for the third. I wouldn't get 3D acceleration across all 3 screens, but at least it would be fast and reliable. I looked at Matrox's forums and it seems that their Linux drivers, even the "official" 2D-only ones, are very limited. No Xv, DPMS, or even SMP support.

Can anyone else think of a good 3-head card, even a PCI one?

I here the Nvidia Quadro4 400NVS for 2D apps only is a good card.

No 3D however.

Has anyone tried using Matrox P690 PCI with a recent kernel? I've just purchased this card and it only runs with the vesa driver. The driver that you download after registration from Matrox does not support recent kernels (I have 2.6.34-gentoo-r11). It compiles but fails to load with a message that some symbols are undefined. Has anyone tried to compile and load the Matrox Parhelia driver (mtxdriver-installer-x86_64-cvs-20090511.run)?

This was the only card with a PCI interface that I could find. I have run out of PCIe slots on my supermicro H8DME-2 motherboard. I don't need any high speed, just a reasonable response when I move a window or print to a terminal window on a DVI 1920x1200 monitor. I currently use a second computer as an X terminal. The build-in ATI graphic card is analogue and too blurry.

The reply of the Matrox tech support was:

> Unfortunately the current driver package available on our website
> does not offer support for your current Linux OS. Support for your
> OS should be available in the next release of our Linux driver. At
> the present time there is no estimated release date.

> Best Regards,

> Emanuele
> Technical Support Representative
> Technical Support Hotline: (514) 685-0270
> Hours of Operation: Monday to Friday from 9AM to 5PM EST