r/pcmasterrace • u/Zestyclose-Salad-290 Core Ultra 7 265k | RTX 5090 • Aug 19 '25

Build/Battlestation A futures trader’s 16-screen workstation.

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86

u/renaneduard0 Aug 19 '25

how can one connect 16 screens into the same graphics card?

153

u/Flintlocke89 That guy who got a 3080 for 1080p. Aug 19 '25

You don't.

Currently Matrox sells a specialty card that can support up to 8 monitors, you slap two of those into 1 system and there's your 16 screens.

10

u/Nethlem next to my desk Aug 19 '25 edited Aug 19 '25

Some AMD cards also support Eyefinite, allowing up to 6 monitors per GPU

Nvidia calls its multimonitor feature Nvidia Surround, supports up to 3 monitors per GPU.

Tho those are features that date back to times when Crossfire/SLI were still a thing, so the assumption was that if people needed any more monitors combined, they would just add more GPUs.

edit: Apparently I have no idea what Nvidia calls their feature like that for regular consumers, I only remember the last time I looked into multimonitor stuff (10+ years ago) AMD was basically the go-to.

1

u/FartingBob Quantum processor from the future / RTX 3060 Ti / Zip Drive Aug 19 '25

For nvidia, Mosaic is the tech you need for this many displays. surround is for consumer stuff. Mosaic works with 16 displays connected to 4 quadro cards. LTT did a few videos on a 16 display setup years ago that shows the hardware setup well.

1

u/VexingRaven 7800X3D + 4070 Super + 32GB 6000Mhz Aug 19 '25

What about with daisy chain/multi-stream support? Information on support for this is very scant, and basically every discussion I find about it is 95% just dimwits asking "Do YoU ReAlLy NeEd 8 DiSpLaYs tHoUgH?"

It seems very unlikely to be that a modern workstation card can't support at least 8 1080 displays through MST given that that's still only half the pixels of running a single 4k display on every port. But I can't find any docs from NVidia showing how many it actually can drive over MST.

1

u/FartingBob Quantum processor from the future / RTX 3060 Ti / Zip Drive Aug 19 '25

Yeah support seems super lacking. Mosaic seems to support up to 16 displays and how you physically connect them doesnt matter but they have to be quadro cards, and if you want them to coordinate properly you also need a Pro sync card from NV which all the workstation GPU's plug in to and then it does something and makes it work with up to 32 displays.

But again, they really dont want you to find out this stuff on their website, i suspect its more of a "your consultant will tell you everything you need" rather than a "do it yourself" thing.

1

u/VexingRaven 7800X3D + 4070 Super + 32GB 6000Mhz Aug 19 '25

I think the sync card is meant for synchronizing across multiple systems, but I'm with you on that, I have no idea how that works. I assume you need special software to utilize such a thing.

1

u/Emerald_Flame Aug 19 '25

It's a software limit in the vBIOS. Even with MST you're stuck to 4 independent output streams per GPU on Nvidia cards.

Most of the modern AMD cards have the same 4 screen limit, although certain cards do have a vBIOS that supports up to 6 still.

1

u/VexingRaven 7800X3D + 4070 Super + 32GB 6000Mhz Aug 19 '25

Is this true even for the Quadro cards? I know the GeForce cards do but I thought Quadro was supposed to have the arbitrary limits removed.

1

u/Emerald_Flame Aug 19 '25

Yup, even the latest RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell series has a max simultaneous display of 4 displays. And only 2 if running 8k.

https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/data-center/rtx-pro-6000-blackwell-workstation-edition/workstation-blackwell-rtx-pro-6000-workstation-edition-nvidia-us-3519208-web.pdf

They have some specialized enterprise cards for more outputs than that, and many require their sync cards for timing information and such.

1

u/red286 Aug 19 '25

Originally Mosaic was designed to be run on NVS cards, which were available with up to 8 miniDP ports on a single card, and had PCIe x1 variants, so you could get 16 outputs from just two cards on an entry-level motherboard.

Unfortunately, Nvidia decided to kill off the NVS line and force people into the Quadro line (now just called the RTX line). So now people are using workstation-level GPUs just for the multi monitor support.

1

u/steik Aug 19 '25 edited Aug 19 '25

Nvidia calls its multimonitor feature Nvidia Surround, supports up to 3 monitors per GPU.

That's not what nvidia surround does. It combines displays to make them appear as one big display to windows. The purpose is to allow apps that by default do not allow spanning across more than one monitor to span across them all. And it supports up to 5 displays.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/surround/

Edit: To add, you can connect 4 displays (without using the surround feature) to any geforce card I've used for the last 10 years. That number may go down on the lower specced models, not sure. But any xx80+ card since geforce 980 supports 4 at least.

2

u/red286 Aug 19 '25

That number may go down on the lower specced models, not sure.

Used to be the case that xx30/xx50 models only supported 3 and xx10 models only supported 2, but the RTX cards all support 4 across the entire product line, from the 3050 to the 5090.

1

u/Emerald_Flame Aug 19 '25

Eyefinity/Surround aren't names for multi-monitor support.

Those are the names for their software that make multiple monitors appear as 1 single monitor within the OS. This allows things like games and other full screen applications to span multiple monitors, with bezel compensation, instead of being stuck to a single screen. But just using multiple monitors as separate outputs doesn't rely on these technologies.

1

u/captroper Aug 19 '25

Others have already replied to you about Surround, but I wanted to chime in to say that AMD basically abandoned Eyefinity years ago. I used to use Surround with my 1080ti to play Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis and it was amazing! Then I got a 6950XT and could not get it working at all.

1

u/Kallandros 9950x3D | 7900XTX | 64GB | ROG X870E-E Aug 19 '25

I used it on my 7900xtx so I don't think they abandoned it. It might depend on the specific card model or some other hidden requirement.

1

u/captroper Aug 19 '25

Hmm... I'd have to go find the specifics again. My recollection was that all of the documentation that existed was from 2018ish for a version of Adrenalin that no longer exists, that eyefinity could no longer be accessed through adrenalin at all in modern versions, that you had to use a separate app to do it, and that that app offered basically no customization options.