The strain on a graphics card will be lower if you just want a bigger desktop for multitasking Word, Chrome, and Netflix, for example. In any case the GPU needs to cope with more pixels, which can be extremely demanding if you want to run the latest games in ultra settings. Whether or not one graphics card will be enough to power your applications depends on what you want to do. That’s more than enough for a dual or triple screen setup. Modern graphics cards like the AMD 5700XT and NVIDIA RTX 2070 have three DisplayPort connectors and one HDMI as a minimum. Even if your desktop’s motherboard has integrated graphics, the choice of ports may be limited or the iGPU (integrated graphics processing unit) won’t have the muscle to handle an expanded graphics load.
We advise getting at least a mid-range discrete graphics card. You really should be on a rather beefy desktop to consider multiple monitors. They lack the ports and processing power. As you may guess, portable PCs don’t make for very good multiple monitor hosts. If you’re on a notebook or laptop you’ll likely be limited to HDMI and maybe USB-C. The connectors on each monitor obviously need to correspond to ports on your source device, in this case your PC.
