Biggest problem seems to be the maximum framebuffer resolution they seem to bake into cards - kinda why I asked what yours reported.  Seems fools that pay that long dollar for the really expensive cards don't ever actually run linux to post results, nor does any official docs read actual what they *do* support under linux.  Why would nvidia actually post real working linux results?

Sadly, aforementioned 5800 AMD cards only supported with 6 DP ports 8192x8192 framebuffer support (great if using non-hd displays), which I could never figure out why wouldn't support a single framebuffer until the AMD guy explained it to me with some escalation to someone competent.  After, I found most cards won't support anything beyond 2-3  displays (ahem, intel) that weren't purpose-built for the task. 

Ubuntu at the time was a basketcase to use multiple framebuffers, meaning separate $DISPLAY namespaces to bind apps to, and most apps would simply come apart if I tried to crash the system.  Even carefully launching apps between displays, it seemed the system/apps would crash hard within a day.  Scratch.

Long story short, multiple display framebuffers weren't an option due to bugs (or lack of anyone conceiving someone might attempt this), so it wasn't until I got a card to support a big enough framebuffer (amd 6xxx+) did I get any reasonable longevity to usage, but still highly buggy with anything actually using gl support.  Xinerama support has never been feasible for real use imho, breaking all gl support.

I might plunge to try wayland tomorrow.  Was reading about it today more, seems kde and other things are building support for it into newer releases (kde requires 5.x or better for wayland/weston non-hardcoded xorg support), so might be worth an adventure.  Worst case I'll fall back to my laptop to work while I kick/beat my system to work next week.

It's gotten *that* unstable lately, it's hardly worse than rebooting every few days.

-mb


On 06/14/2015 12:17 AM, Stephen Partington wrote:

This is a bit of what I had in mind 90 a card. Dual head. 3 cards for sub 300

Here is a great deal on the PNY Quadro NVS 310 VCNVS310DVI-PB 512MB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card , http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=14-133-463
I found.

On Jun 13, 2015 11:53 PM, "Stephen Partington" <cryptworks@gmail.com> wrote:

I think their consumer cards and quadros are limited to 2 displays. And the nvs line is built for 4. Now depending on what your system has available you could go with 3 cheaper desktop cards and run them that way. Makes me wonder if Matrox is still around doing their thing or not.

On Jun 13, 2015 11:43 PM, "Michael Butash" <michael@butash.net> wrote:
Interesting note (imho), I went digging around nvidia's site today, trying to familiarize myself with their line of overpriced video cards aka quadro's.  What I found was most of their website doesn't render or work properly, half the links were broken, half their pdf's didn't download, and in general looks like something a 10 year old put together (or me, meh for aesthetics).  Wow, you'd think they could afford some competent web developers at least.

Sadly seems every card that can do "mosaic" mode, including sli to achieve nvidia's qualifications to support sli were $500+ used on ebay, needing multiple cards of them, in the kepler (K) line of cards or better to achieve.  I guess it's one of those ymmv/"get what you pay for" sort of things to support what I don't necessarily expect should cost me $1000+ to support my 6 displays, and really not sure even that is any better/worse than AMD's support until I see it.

Seeing as no one at AMD gives a real darn about real linux support (hark! yet another COD windoze game came out with broken dx rendering, support!), it might be worth the price, but the childish/broken website from nvidia makes me loathe to want to invest there either, figuring I'll see the same brokenness I see with amd.

-mb


On 06/12/2015 06:45 PM, Stephen Partington wrote:

I need to install and check.

On Jun 12, 2015 4:20 PM, "Michael Butash" <michael@butash.net> wrote:
Stephen, out of curiosity, what does your xrandr show as a max framebuffer size on your quadro?

mb@host:~$ xrandr | grep maximum
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 11520 x 1200, maximum 16384 x 16384

This was a big limiter for me, in the past I couldn't figure out why my old ATI 5800 card with 6 ports wouldn't support a full, single framebuffer, but was internally limited to 8192x8192, with the 6xxx+ supporting 16384x16384.  Xorg wasn't too forthcoming with that info, and it was prior to xrandr support in their drivers, so totally left me scratching my head until escalating with AMD support to an engineer with a clue that told me that.

With the advent of 4k displays, they still seem limited to that, which means I can only do 4x wide until vendors give to open that up.

Thanks!

-mb


On 06/12/2015 03:55 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
Next time I have an absolute need to upgrade hardware, I plan on avoiding ati/amd at all costs.  After dealing with them for a good 5 years as the only real viable option to run my displays, only to be wrought with constant disappointment, problems, and frustration.  Buying highly overpriced quadro cards might be money well spent at this point, but I still despise nvidia that they're really little other than rebranded, and marked-up normal video cards with driver-locked (to bios-id) features.

That said, going to set up some ebay agents to look for decent quadro's to snipe.  I had good luck getting my last few amd cards that way on the cheap, gotta love jbidwatcher for cheating some other person with a last-second bid.

Thanks as always for the input Stephen.

-mb


On 06/12/2015 03:20 PM, Stephen Partington wrote:
I have almost given up on ATI, if i want just multiple screens i would look into the Quadro NVS cards. Such as the NVS 510 or the K1200. They may be very proprietary to get running, but my success with Nvidia cards in both linux and windows really makes it worthwhile. These cards will only do a single monitor, but they are cheap enough to run 2 cards with reasonable usability. or one NVS and one more Gamer friendly card.


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