Oh my! Well, from faint 30-years-on recollection, it was the end of '96 so I guess I needed to save up for it. Thanks for the correction! Ordinary relatively c

Oh my! Well, from faint 30-years-on recollection, it was the end of '96 so I guess I needed to save up for it. Thanks for the correction! Ordinary relatively cheap consumer Matrox cards could be paired up. I couldn't afford a fancy dual-output card, but I could afford 2 second-hand Matrox Millennium cards, and that did the job fine. At that time, Matrox was about the only brand of (parallel PCI) graphics card where the drivers could handle multiple cards. You couldn't do it with ATI or S3 or any of the other commodity GPUs back then, but any old Matrox with any other of around the same generation worked. They could have dissimilar amounts of memory and things and it still worked. About 20 years later, I was working at SUSE in Prague, and we had lots of old nVidia cards available in the office spares pile, and lots of spare LCDs around the 22" - 24" size range. Two screens was easy: most nVidia pro-range cards can drive 2 outputs. I had the desk space and available screens, so I decided to try 3. Then the nightmare began. Nouveau doesn't care: if it's nVidia, it'll drive it. But nVidia's own drivers are tied to specific GPU generations, but those generations are not marked on the card or in the easily-accessible specs anywhere. It's mostly a case of installing the card, booting Linux, seeing what the driver describes the GPU family generation as, and then Googling to try to find which of the random pile of cards to hand is a matching GPU family and generation. I never got 3 screens working together adequately, and the combinations crashed my OS often. For emergencies I kept a Windows partition and its behaviour with mismatched cards is quite funny in an annoying way. 1. Boot 2. Identify first card 3. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it 4. Reboot 5. Find second card 6. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it 7. Card 1 now does not work. So... 8. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it 9. Reboot 10. Second card now does not work. 11. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it... It would sit there taking 10min or so per loop until you pulled the plug. With Linux, it's just a case of: Human IDs GPU; manually installs driver; sees if both cards work. The answer is, generally, "no", so: Swear, remove one card, substitute, try again. Eventually I went to the IT department who gave me an elderly, huge, AMD card. 2 full length slots, 2 cooling fans, and a decade old so rubbish performance by 20-teens standards. But, 4 display outputs, and use any combination you want -- and native FOSS drivers, so no need to manually install anything. Joy, peace, and calm descended. Then a couple of months later, COVID... and working off a little Dell laptop with only an Intel onboard GPU and one external screen. I did in the end get 2 external screens and the built in screen working, but only using an X11 desktop that didn't do much fancy 3D rendering (Xfce) because it didn't have enough VRAM for triple-head and compositing.