In my opinion productivity increases with multiple monitors. My current setup is: 24″ (1920×1200) landscape, 24″ (1200×1920) portrait (I can very much recommend that for reading emails in thunderbird!) and a beamer with 1280×768.
With my ATI card before it didn’t work – either I could use the portrait monitor or the beamer. Also – strangely – this only worked with the open-source driver – not with the proprietary ATI driver. But this article isn’t an ATI bashing, therefore to something else.
After some studies in the NVidia Linux forum I bought a Nvidia GTX660 (ca. 200€ mid Feb. 2013). It has 4 digital connectors: 2x DVI (1x DVI-I (a analog connection with an adapter), 1x DVI-D), 1x HDMI and 1x DisplayPort (DP).
The installation was most simple: (under Linux Mint 13 – should work the same under Ubuntu 12.04 resp. 12.10): The packet nvidia-experimental in version 310 must be installed, after that a reboot and – presto! With the normal ubuntu monitor-settings dialog the position of the monitors can be adjusted and their resolution. For a test I added a forth monitor to the above setting with a resolution of 1680×1050 – what also worked without a hinge with the total display spanning all 4 monitors – it was possible to move a window around on all 4 monitors. In sum the resolution was: 1920+1200+1280+1680=6080 x 1920 (24″ portrait).
Conclusion: Nvidia graphics cards of the keppler class work very well under linux – with the proprietary drivers. Even suspend-to-harddisk works out of the box!