How good is FreeBSD at multiple monitor display?

puppydog

puppydog

I've been thinking about replacing my desktop Mac with a FreeBSD desktop that I will assemble, but I wanted to ask about the multiple display situation first.

I currently have four monitors all connected via thunderbolt to my Mac. If build this FreeBSD desktop that I'm considering, then I would be using a Geforce RTX 3060 (non-negotiable for this project because I have one extra lying around that I intend to put to good use), which has three DP 1.4 ports and an HDMI port. I would be doing one of three things:

1) Connecting the monitors to the DP ports but daisy chain two of them (the two that I intend to do this with are newish so I'm pretty sure they have a daisy chain supporting DP port)
2) Connecting all four monitors to these four ports (I think at least one of them has HDMI in)
3) Connecting three of the monitors to the GPU DP ports and the fourth one to the motherboard's onboard DP port

Those three options are pretty much listed in order of preference, but I'd be able to live with any of the three.

Now, my question is, will I run into any trouble doing this in FreeBSD with the proprietary Nvidia driver? I'm not doing anything especially fancy like needing each monitor to have a different resolution or anything. Basically all I require is that they work as four screens with one big extended desktop that I can arrange as needed for my layout, and two of them need to rotate 90 degrees. And ideally I will be able to maximize a window on each monitor.

I intend to use xfce4 for this, and I have no special preference between X11 and Wayland, as long as it does what I've described here.

Will this part of the project work pretty much out of the box? Will I need to do a bunch of special configurations to make it work? Or is it just doomed to failure altogether?
 
I only have experience with two monitors on FreeBSD, and using the drm* drivers (Intel or AMD) with Xfce. Works out of the box, no fiddling needed. Never tried daisy chaining monitors on FreeBSD, so I can't say anything about it.
 
It works. I use xrandr and arandr to configure my displays under CDE.

This is not a FreeBSD base OS thing per se. The desktop environment would manage the displays for you and if it doesn't you need one or both of the utilities installed from ports/packages. xrandr comes with Xorg while arandr is a GUI app that is easier to use than xrandr. Though you can use xrandr to configure your displays at login from .xsession, .xinitrc, .dtprofile or whatever other script your GUI environment uses.
 
puppydog said:
2) Connecting all four monitors to these four ports (I think at least one of them has HDMI in)
Click to expand...
If your monitors are with VRR and 4k - forget HDMI even knowing its 2.1 ( unless is very, very expensive cable with 120hz 4k support and not only written HDMI 2.1 cable). You wont get 120hz and more on 4k. only 2k and below. so you will have DP with lets say 4k x 120 and your HDMI on 4k will be 60 max. I think needs to be "HDMI Premium High Speed mit Ethernet" or "HDMI Ultra High Speed" and i never ever tried to deal with it so remember - cables are important. My 3070ti works fine with hdmi cable 4k 120hz on windows , but same cable had no 4k 120hz, actually i could not even have a screen with it. ( Linux ). Maybe FreeBSD is different ? but im doubtful as its mostly will be cables and multi monitors in FreeBSD are just fine.
 
I have configured my workstation with three 1920x1200 monitors, all connected via DisplayPort directly into my AMD 5700XT. Your Nvidia card will work every bit as well as the AMD card. Using XFCE's diplay setting tool, I was able to configure the layout without issue. Two of my monitors have a DisplayPort out, so I could daisy chain, but I didn't setup that way. I ended up taking one of those monitors to work, so I can't test the daisy chain setup, but I can't see how that would have any issues.
 
I have two workstations each with 1x 3840x2160 and 2x 2560x1440 in different orientations and it all works well without problems.
Sometimes I connect a fourth display and it just works.
Likewise, laptop with external monitors works too.

I don't have any experiences with DP daisy-chaining but I'd imagine that that is handled on a low enough level not to affect anything.

But as mentioned above this is not really an OS thing. In my case I'm using X11/Xorg.
 
I used to use 4 monitors, (2 NVidia cards with multiports). I *think* I used some NVidia GUI to configure them, but it was pretty painless. I used dwm as my window manager, because it was very good at being able to have a different tag (more or less like workspaces) for each monitor, where as openbox, if I changed the workspace on one monitor the others would change as well.
 
scottro said:
I *think* I used some NVidia GUI to configure them
Click to expand...
Yes you did. I did the same as you with two nvidia cards and those multiports. I still have one in this system now. I misspoke earlier when I said the monitor broke. It was actually one of those nvidia cards that did.
 
cy@ said:
… arandr is a GUI app that is easier to use than xrandr. …
Click to expand...

NVIDIA Settings:
1719073871088.png
 
good
in .xinitrc i have :
Code: 
xrandr --output DP-1 --mode 1600x900
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1680x1050
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --primary --output DP-1 --right-of HDMI-0
 
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