Tag: graphics card

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:

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:

SUSE/OpenSUSE/etc:

RHEL/Fedora/etc:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

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

Gentoo:

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:

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:

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:

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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Find Your Graphics Card Information

Today’s article isn’t all that spectacular, but it is useful, as we’re going to discuss a few ways to find your graphics card information. That’s handy stuff to know, especially if you are new to the computer or are looking to do things like find drivers for said graphics card. This should be remarkably quick and easy, actually.

We will be using tools we’ve used before. These are simple tools, tools used to learn hardware information. Well, they can all be narrowed down to show just the graphics card information. They can also give information about other hardware, not just graphics card information.

All the tools we’ll be using should be installed by default. We will use one program that isn’t necessarily installed by default. That program will be inxi. You can learn how to install inxi easily enough, and the rest should be installed by default. If inxi is not installed, install it.

Like I said, the article should be fairly quick and easy. You only need a few specific commands. ‘Snot all that complicated, now is it? 

So, let’s take a minute to read an article that tells you how to learn more about your…

Graphics Card Information:

As is often the case, this article requires an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, let’s go ahead and use the inxi command first:

See? Plenty of graphics card information.

How about we use ‘lshw’, a tool for listing hardware information? Well, the command for that would be pretty easy. You just need to specify that you want graphics card information. It looks like:

Finally, we can use ‘grep’ and ‘lspci’. We’ll also use the -k flag to list kernel drivers. It’s easy. You don’t have to memorize it, you can just refer back here later when you actually have a need for your graphics card information. It looks like:

That should do it. You can use any of those three methods (or more) to find your graphics card info. I just use on-board graphics, so a screenshot would be quite boring.

Closure:

Well, there you have it. You have yet another article. I didn’t go deep into the usage of each tool because there’s no reason to. Each program has a help file associated with it. Consult the help file if you wish to know more. This article’s goal was to demonstrate a specific use.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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