Can a Mac drive 4x 8K displays as a single contiguous desktop?

rpseguin wrote:

Thanks!

It really wasn’t a Mac Studio question, but apple.com’s forums seem a bit too eager to categorize into buckets.

I was not trying to put you into a "Bucket". I was trying to find a Mac that would support a lot of monitors, as only the high end will do that. The Mac Studio being one of them.

I just looked up the Mac Pro specs, and it is the same as the Mac Studio

• Eight displays with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz
• Six displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
• Three displays with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz

All other Macs will support fewer monitors.

So at this time, if you want a 2x2 configuration of 8K monitors, you will need to use a Linux box with the necessary extra GPU cards.

No other Mac will come close to the monitor support in the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro.

Keep in mind that for the most part Apple is a "Consumer" computer company. Their Pro line tends to support creative artists in audio, photo and video. So the bulk of their hardware and software tends to favor Mom & Pop users, some medium power users, and in a few small markets professionals.

What you want to do is currently outside the scope of the current Mac product line.

With respect to OpenGL, I do not know Apple's reasons for stopping OpenGL support, except about that time "Metal" came out, which is more or less Apple's "DirectX". I suppose it made more economic sense to focus on Metal as they could make it faster on Mac, since they could tailor the APIs to more closely match the hardware primitives available on Macs. Also Mac suffered performance issues in gaming compared to DirectX based games, so another reason for Apple to create "Metal". Dropping support for OpenGL may have just been a case of stealing all the Apple OpenGL developers for the "Metal" project.

From your standpoint it would be a pain to change portable graphics APIs, but here is a link to alternatives to OpenGL. I am not a graphics person. I not even a GUI type person, as I spend most of my time working in a terminal emulator ssh'ed into Linux systems working in the Vim source code editor.

https://alternativeto.net/software/opengl/

Mac Studio M2 Ultra

Simultaneous support for up to eight displays:

• Eight displays with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz
• Six displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
• Three displays with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz

The only way to add more monitors than what a Mac supports is via a USB3 DisplayLink adapter and DisplayLink software, HOWEVER, I cannot find and adapters that support an 8K monitor. Just 4K

https://www.displaylink.com/products/hot-products

So it looks like just three 8K monitors. But those 3 monitors can be in a single unified desktop.

Thank you for elaborating.

It seems to me, though I am far from an expert, that this kind of rendering would require far more GPU power than what a single Mac Studio could provide. And, as OpenGL is so central to your software, I would not rely on Apple on this one (though I am a big fan of the Mac Studio, have one and have guided others to opt for it, but for different use cases).

Apple has made it pretty clear that they are not investing efforts on OpenGL, and for quite some time now. Metal is the underlying framework on all Mac graphics work, and that is not likely to change.

Four 8K displays is a huge amount of pixels to push around. And, as noted, OpenGL has long been deprecated. Are you using some software that depends on OpenGL? I would not be confident of it working reliably in the future, and it may not run at all.

I am curious as to what sort of application would require this combination of old software and huge displays. Can you tell us a bit about it?

And about Bob’s suggestion of three displays: maybe three rotated displays placed horizontally could work?

rpseguin wrote:

Thanks!

It really wasn’t a Mac Studio question, but apple.com’s forums seem a bit too eager to categorize into buckets.

Yeah, I know that Apple has decided to go the metal route, but they’re “solution” seems to want to lock you exclusively into Mac[OS]. OpenGL is portable.

Except that it sort of is. There would be zero chance of any lesser Mac supporting all these high pixel count displays. The only models even worthy of consideration are Mac Studio or Mac Pro.

In fact, I think that it might be possible with an older Intel Mac Pro, if you added extra graphics cards, but it would be darned expensive. In fact, I expect that any Linux machine that can drive all those displays will definitely required extra graphics cards - you will be looking at a tower with several PCI slots filled with expensive graphics cards. It is not like any regular pc that you can buy or assemble with cheap components can do it. It can't.

My code is portable and compiles and runs on Linux, MacOS, and, if needed, I could spend some time and make it work in Windoze (blech!).

I understand that. Having a portable, platform agnostic code, as much as possible, is something that I can relate to. Unfortunately, this is an area where that is not so easy to do.

Why not use smaller 4K monitors in some 8 monitor arrangement, or 6K monitors in some 6 monitor arrangement.

The smaller monitor size will give you smaller pixels, which would give it the kind of resolution 8K would give just spread across more displays.

Yes, all the monitor edges will take away some of the effect of a single huge display, but I'm just throwing that out there.

I know there intel server boxes can support that kind of RAM. My Wife frequently works with servers that have terabytes of RAM and petabytes of NVMe storage.

I on the other have to work with company cloud virtual machines that have 32GB of memory allocated to them, and 6 cores (some might be hyper thread cores), and 1.5TB of iSCSI storage, that I get to partition as needed for testing.

I help develop a file system that support petabytes of storage, but I have to test on small test volumes. Go figure.

NOTE: I can see one advantage to using a Mac to drive the displays. The unified memory, which means there is no data transfer between the CPU and the GPU. Both have equal access to the same memory, so the CPU can just give the GPU a pointer, and the handoff is complete.

Of course if you need terabytes of RAM, that is an issue you cannot get around with the Mac, just like the monitor limits are hard and fast.