Quad head video card

[Mike A. Harris]

Erwin Rol wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> For a client I am looking for a quad head video card. The card should be
> PCI and without a fan. The card should have the ability to do video
> playback on all heads with a minimum CPU load in a 4 head Xinerama
> setup. 3D performance is not important at all, and if DRI/OpenGL doesn't
> work or only works in software doesn't matter. 

There are some quad head S3 cards that aparently work with the OSS
drivers.  Alan Cox had a few a year or so ago.  Might find something
like that on Ebay.

> Since this all is for a projects with a long (10 years and more)
> lifetime it is important that the drivers are pure open source so that
> we aren't depending on the manufacturer to give use a driver for Xorg
> 8.0 or Linux 3.0. 

That rules out Matrox, as their quad boards require proprietary
hallib.  The OSS nvidia driver doesn't support dualhead, so that
rules nvidia out.  The "radeon" driver is OSS, and there are Quad
Radeon boards available from Appian and perhaps others, which are
fanless.  Not sure if they work with the OSS driver or not, but
I would guess probably not.


> Does anybody have any experience with quad head PCI cards or two dual
> head PCI cards or 4 single head PCI cards ? Any advice on what is a good
> chipset for Xorg (in case we will make our own quadhead card) ?

4 single head cards will probably work, but there might be a bit
of hit and miss.  3D definitely wont work in such a setup.  Not
sure if you'd get working Xv or not.

2 dualhead cards might or might not work.  nv is out, some cards
work dualhead with matrox without the hallib (G550, 450).  Radeon
dualhead works, but I think someone mentioned recently that it
is broken if you try to use 2 dualhead cards in a quadhead
configuration.

Also, it depends on wether you're planning on using all VGA
connectors, or all DVI, or some mixture of both.  The mga
driver had limitations with DVI support last I remember.

All in all, probably not what you wanted to hear, but then it's
not that common a setup either.  ;o)  Please do report back any
successes/failures though.  Hopefully you can get a working
fully OSS solution.

Good luck!

TTYL

-- 
Mike A. Harris, Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
Proud to be Canadian.