Early NVIDIA rival Matrox debuts new dual-GPU graphics card: supports 4x 8K displays

Matrox, an early competitor to NVIDIA, has unveiled a new dual-GPU graphics card that has support for up to four 8K displays.

2

Matrix was a major graphics card competitor in the 1990s alongside NVIDIA, ATI, and 3dfx, with the company earning its stars and stripes for its exceptional 2D image quality and dual-head support before it became a standard. However, Matrox decided to exit the mainstream gaming GPU market as it fell behind 3D acceleration performance compared to NVIDIA and ATI, resulting in the company pursuing work in fields such as video capture, video editing hardware, and multi-display solutions, which it has now carved out a niche in.

For example, Matrox graphics cards are commonly used to power major displays, such as the Sphere in Las Vegas, an extremely large music and entertainment venue that consists. More specifically, while NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs handle the rendering for the Sphere's massive LED displays, which consist of an interior 160,000-square-foot wraparound with a 16K resolution, and an exterior 580,000-square-foot display, Matrox graphics cards provide the backbone for the video signal routing and control.

According to Matrox, it will be releasing the LUMA Pro A380 Octal, a dual-GPU graphics card that features two Intel Arc A380E GPUs and eight Mini DisplayPort 2.0 outputs, enabling support for up to four 8K displays, or eight 5K screens at once. The A380 Octal is a single-slot PCIe 4.09 x16 card that features 12GB of GDDR6 memory and a 130W TDP. As for supported APIs, Matrox states the A380 Octal is compatible with DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenCL 3.0.

There is also support for HDR, VESA DSC compression, Adaptive Sync, and HDCP 2.3, with the maximum bit depth of up 36 bits per pixel. Additionally, the card is capable of streaming mult-channel high-definition audio through four digital outputs. Furthermore, Matrox writes that two cards can be placed in a single system and be frame-locked for synchronized video output.

Lastly, there is a second model, Matrox is preparing to release, the A380 Quad, a weaker version of the A380 Octal, as it features a single GPU, 6GB of memory, and four full-size DisplayPort connectors. As you can probably imagine, the Quad variant is intended to be a solution to far less demanding problems.

Matrox didn't provide any details on pricing for either of the models, but the company has said they are both "coming soon."