I'm unaware of the ability to drive a 4-monitor xorg desktop off of Intel graphics. The user in question here was attempting to do such a thing, which was supposed to be possible with the Nvidia cards. If his/her 'problem' was in purchasing Nvidia cards, then what would your recommendation be for creating such a setup be?

Not the OP, but I think the open source AMD drivers support both DisplayPort and Dual Link DVI, so there's probably several cards from them that would work.

so, you're saying that anyone that wants reasonable 3D performance, 2+ displays, and GPGPU support can go fuck themselves? :/

don't get me wrong, open source is great. we need it now more than ever. but this is exactly the wrong sort of attitude to take.

There's always AMD. The open source AMD drivers are great for the 5000 and 6000 series, and support for the 7000 (and by extension 9000) series is getting better.

If you're interested in compute just pick up a 5850 or 5770 from a friend, they're cheap (if you can find them) and they run well with the open source drivers, and have support for at least 3 monitors. My 6850 has 2 DVIs, an HDMI and 2 miniDPs, I can drive 4 monitors at once with it.

I would counter that the AMD drivers are not great. I got a whitebox last year with a 5770, and the experience was terrible. The open source drivers couldn't do 3D acceleration properly, and the proprietary drivers refused to do dual-screen - the maximum available resolution across desktops was a square 1920x1920.

In my experience, nvidia has been providing a superior linux experience in the trenches for the past couple of years. The 'amd is good for linux' seems to be an emotion from yesteryear.

I use amd with three displays on debian for a couple of years now, never had any problems.

You could just as easily have blamed him for using the proprietary vs free (open-source) drivers, with the same effect (and he still gets better performance).

Seems like your distaste for a company/policy is running this comment.

Yes, i bought a machine with intel graphics for that reason but i never had as many kernel panics before. i915 leads http://oops.kernel.org/ :-/

The 915 chipset specifically is ancient and terrible. In fact, you could make the argument that that chipset was partially responsible for Vista's launch failure (background here: http://seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2008403670_microsoft1...)

Ancient? My machine (thinkpad x220) was brand new in 2011.

Ah, gotcha. Yes. the 915 was originally released in 2004. The GPU in an x220 is an HD3000, which apparently uses the same driver. Confusing.