Show Your Graphics Card Version

Today’s article will not be all that complicated, consisting of just one real command that will show your graphics card version. This is information handy for things like finding drivers or for troubleshooting. You might also use this information to verify that you got the product you ordered without having to open the case.

This article won’t have a lot of substance to it. The content is just from my notes and I figured that it was useful information to have. I’m quite certain that this knowledge is out there somewhere. I’d credit the person(s) who shared the information with me, but I don’t have that information. So, thanks for the article idea, whoever you are.

There are all sorts of ways to learn about your graphics card. Of course, there are. This is Linux! We’ll just be covering one way to learn this information and to display this information in the terminal. That sounds just like the kind of thing we do here on Linux-Tips.

This time around, we’ll be installing an application. The application may not be installed by default in some distros, so we’ll cover the installation process as well. Ideally, even a brand-new user can follow along with this article. They’ll need to cut and paste as they learn a little about an application known as glxinfo.

About glxinfo:

The glxinfo application may not be installed by default and you may need to install it. You’ll find that it briefly describes itself as this:

glxinfo – show information about the GLX implementation

Importantly, the man page elaborates, giving more information:

The glxinfo program shows information about the OpenGL and GLX implementations running on a given X display.

The information includes details about the server and client-side GLX implementation, the OpenGL and GLU implementations as well as a list of available GLX visuals.

So, you can do more with glxinfo than just get the graphics card version. The odds are good that we’ll revisit glxinfo in a future article. It’s a good thing that you’ve already installed it by the time that article rolls off the presses!

Installing glxinfo:

We’ll be installing glxinfo with the terminal. You can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal will open up. If it doesn’t, you can assign it as a keyboard shortcut and open it from the application menu.

You may have glxinfo installed already, you can run the following command. If any information comes out the other side, you have glxinfo already installed and can skip the installation section:

glxinfo -h

With your terminal open (and you’ll need it for the next section), you may need to start this process by installing glxinfo. You should find that glxinfo is available for most distros, so use the appropriate command below:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

sudo apt install glxinfo

SUSE/OpenSUSE/etc:

sudo zypper install mesa-utils

RHEL/Fedora/etc:

sudo yum install mesa-utils

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

sudo pacman -S mesa-utils

I’m not 100% sure of the following, but:

Gentoo:

sudo emerge -a x11-apps/mesa-progs

One of those should work to install glxinfo. Which one will depend on the package manager you’re using. I don’t have enough experience with Gentoo, but Google tells me that’s the command you want.

Now that you have glxinfo installed…

Show Your Graphics Card Version:

It’s hopefully true that you installed glxinfo and left your terminal open after that. If you didn’t, you’ll need to open your terminal again. You need an open terminal to run the glxinfo application. So, if you closed the terminal you should open it again now.

The first thing you can check is glxinfo’s man page. That’s nice and simple:

man glxinfo

As you see, there aren’t a whole lot of options – but there’s a whole lot of information involved. If you want, you can just run this command:

glxinfo

See what I mean about being overwhelmed with information?

Fortunately, we only want to show the graphics card version. That means we can use grep for this exercise. To just show your graphics card version (and a little superfluous information, narrowed down nicely), you would want to use this command:

glxinfo | grep -iE 'vendor:|device:|version:'

As you can see, the command uses grep to show fields with the vendor, the device, and the version number. That’s all you need to know for this exercise, though glxinfo does provide a great deal of additional information.

Closure:

Well, that’s about it for this article – and it is another article. This one can come in handy for things like new computers or reminding yourself what you have installed. It’s a quick and easy way to show your graphics card version and a handy application with a bunch of information. It has more information about your graphics than I’d care to know. I’m not even sure what to do with all that information.

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