Data wall hardware

[vflorins]

I hope to receive some input from the community or from NVidia regarding the following project. We (UC Riverside) are planning to purchase a multiscreen data wall (2x2 or 3x2 screens) with a total resolution of perhaps 5-8 Mpixels. This will be used for visualization of large 3D data sets (e.g., from CFD simulations). What would be the best way to drive such a display?

We are considering the following options:

1. Two/three G80 cards in a single box, each driving two screens in Twin View mode which are then combined into a single 2x2 or 3x2 desktop using Xinerama.

2. Link an entire row of screens together with Matrox TripleHead2Go and use a single G80 card with TwinView. Unfortunately, the Matrox box is analog only (no DVI).

3. Quadro X2. Will there be professional G80-based X2 cards? One such card can drive a 2x2 display, but is the framebuffer shared between GPUs?

4. Two/three G80 cards in separate boxes, controlled via DMX and Chromium. This will be obviously a slower solution, but more extensible.

What do you folks think about these options? Are there more I may have missed?