Matrox Unveils Wild LUMA Pro A380 Octal Graphics Card With Dual Intel Arc GPUs

If you read that headline and thought "Who, now?" then you're probably not a PC enthusiast or under the age of 30. If you instead thought "That's a name I haven't heard,"  then you clearly don't work in the medical imaging or digital signage industries. Matrox might not be a direct competitor with AMD or NVIDIA anymore—not since the fateful days of the Parhelia—but the company has survived to this day by focusing on its historical strengths: high-quality multi-monitor display output. Well, it doesn't get a lot more "multi" than eight displays off one card.

The LUMA Pro A380 Octal is exactly what it sounds like: an Intel Arc A380 graphics card sporting fully eight display connections. In this specific case, it has eight mini-DisplayPort 2.0 jacks that can each drive a 5K60 display, or use two for a 5K120 or 8K60 HDR screen. The card supports hardware-synchronized framelocking, so you can be absolutely certain that each of the screens will refresh at the same time, and you can even link two of the cards to force them to update all sixteen outputs simultaneously.


So what's up with the dual-GPU thing? Well, it's simple, really. The Alchemist ACM-G11 GPU that powers the Intel Arc A380 supports four display pipes. If you want eight displays, you're gonna need two GPUs, and that's all there is to it. Unlike the recently-revealed Arc Pro B60 that packs a wallop with dual Battlemage GPUs and 48GB of GDDR6 memory, the LUMA Pro A380 Octal isn't meant to be a compute monster; it's meant to drive up to sixteen fully synchronized screens. It could be pretty baller for video transcode processing, though Matrox apparently doesn't offer access to the Arc GPUs' video encoders through its custom drivers.


The LUMA Pro A380 Octal is the big-boy version of the already-extant LUMA Pro A380 Quad, which has four standard-sized DP 2.0 connections in a very similar single-slot form factor. There's also the LUMA Pro A310 Quad, once again making use of mini-DisplayPort to pack four high-bandwidth video connections into a half-height half-length graphics card, and still supporting all of the same synchronization and framelocking functions. The LUMA Pro A380 Octal's 130W TDP will require a peripheral power connector, although it's not clear if it's a 6- or 8-pin.

If you're keen to grab one of these cards, you'll want to contact Matrox directly, although the LUMA Pro A380 Quad and A310 Quad can be found at resellers like CDW and Provantage if you're in a hurry. The A380 Octal was just announced and isn't quite available yet, but expect it to be well north of four figures when it hits store shelves.