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There's no reason a whole Thunderbolt bus is needed for every two displays. It's just Apple's decision to build their GPU that way.

And to not support industry standard NVIDIA GPU on ARM Macs, too. 1 GPU typically supports 5 output over as little bandwidth as PCIe x1.

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Not with nVidia, no, they are 4 displays, always has been. The NVS810 8x display card is using two GM107 GPUs.

AMD is 6 displays. You see this rarely on consumer boards but the ASRock 5700 XT Taichi for some inexplicable reason did expose all six -- with four DisplayPorts to boot, too. I do not think there has been 4 DP or six output customer cards since.

Even with less ports you can use Display MST hubs to breakout 3 displays from one. (But not on a Mac, even intel, they never added driver support. Works in windows boot camp though)

There are couple 900-, 10-, 20-, 30-Series NVIDIA with 5 outputs. 700- and below had up to 4. IIUC it's more like up to (x px, y px) max with up to N independent clocks without external adapters or something along that.

Just because there are X outputs on GPU, doesn't mean it will work with all of them at the same time

I was doing 5 for no reason from a GTX970 at one point. They just work. But for some reason(segmentation?) NVIDIA brochure pages sometimes disagree or contradict with products in the market.

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