Hi slackers,

I know nothing about graphics cards, I've always (it turns out) been using integrated graphics which have usually worked very well out-of-the-box with slackware.

Now I will soon be in the market for a custom desktop machine and wish to drive 3 or 4 monitors so I presume I'll need a discrete graphics card for this. My reading tells me these USB "graphics adaptors" do not give good performance, although please correct me if I'm wrong.

I get the impression that certain cards work better under Linux in general and perhaps slackware in particular than others. Are any of willing to share your experiences (both good and bad) on this subject?

I thought this has probably been discussed before but a quick forum search did not turn up anything useful. If you are aware of any other resources on LQ (or elsewhere) please don't hesitate to point me toward them. I found the LQ hardware compatability list but it's ordered by brand and there are a few hundred there listed in alphabetical order and they don't specifically talk about multiple monitors (maybe it's too elementary!). I thought it might be more efficient to ask for a few recommendations/warnings from slackers instead.

Many thanks,

Michael

There is a perennial debate re Nvidia vs AMD cards. Both have pros and cons, fans and detractors. If you have a specific need; ie CAD/CAE optimized for a particular technology, a specific make or model might be best. It always comes down to "what do you need it for?".

I probably lean more towards team green, ie Nvidia.

You may want to look into 4K monitors. Prices have come down a lot, and a 4K monitor has more pixels than most multi-monitor setups. Any recent graphics card will drive a 4K monitor - look for Displayport 1.2 with single-stream transport at 60Hz refresh.
Ed

Nvidia has one of the better multi-monitor support vectors. The free and OEM drivers both work very well.

Thanks everyone for your replies so far; they are all very useful.

I guess I should clarify: this is for my work desktop: I am a statistics lecturer so mainly document authoring, some coding, data visualisation etc but NOT gaming.

I suppose I have two questions:

1. If I want to drive 3 or 4 monitors, am I better off looking for a single video/graphics card with this ability, or just get 2 "standard" (whatever that means, maybe similar in performance to integrated graphics, which can drive two displays) cards? (ReaperX7 has more-or-less answered this one I suppose)

2. Are the out-of-the-box drivers available in slackware able to drive whatever card/s I might need? What exactly is involved if not? On SBo I see slackbuilds for a bunch of e.g. nvidia drivers; are such things "compulsory" if one has the corresponding card?

Many thanks,

Michael

Technically the free drivers work through the default Xorg multiple monitor setups. Usually these are setup as a left-of/right-of setting, while the OEM drivers use Nvidia's TwinView/Multi-Monitor configurations.

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Either NVIDIA or AMD cards will suit your needs and are relatively straightforward out of the box; you don't have to use the sbopkg drivers. The proprietary drivers will work, and are easy to install or you can stick with the default nouveau or radeon drivers. The only other thing you need to pay attention to is the size of the card, number and type of slots and whether it needs supplementary power. Since you're not gaming, you can probably avoid a multi slot extra power beast. If you are using certain professional programs for data visualization you might get better results with a somewhat more expensive "professional" version (supposedly) ie a low end Quadro or FirePro.

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If you are picky about having the colors match on all the screens try not to use both analog (VGA) and digital (DVI/HDMI) in your setup. I've never been able to get the colors of an analog output to match the colors of a digital output even when using identical monitors. I have no experience with DisplayPort.

I'm probably a few years out of date. Video cards probably don't have VGA signals anymore.