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Prior to mainstream adoption of the
PCIe bus, configurations of more than two monitors were either achieved with an AGP card with dual video outputs or by using an
AGP graphics adapter as the primary device and a
Conventional PCI graphics adapter as a secondary device. Given the bandwidth limitations of the older PCI bus, however, such setups were not common, and maximum overall graphics performance could be obtained only by using specialty solutions such as the
Matrox G450, which features four outputs from one graphics adapter. Now that computers with two or more
PCIe interfaces are popular, middle- and high-end computers are no longer limited to two monitors driven by a single main graphics adapter. If a dual PCIe interface is not available or is otherwise occupied, a standard PCI graphics card can still be used to provide additional video outputs, albeit with performance trade-offs. Specialized application environments such as
CAD, day trading of corporate stocks, and software development are increasingly using six or more monitors on one production system.
Additional monitors can also be connected to PCs via a USB connection such as
DisplayLink.
