In this article we will explain how to get graphics card information using the command line.
Get Hardware Details
There are only a few commands to get hardware information; lspci is one of the command line tools that fetches details about the graphics card. Run the following command to get the graphics card information on your system. You will see it output sonething like this:
The first line has the name of the vendor, the model name/series and the pci id. Note the numbers in the bracket: 8086:0f31. Such a number is present for almost all graphics cards. The first part, 8086, indicates the vendor id (which is Intel here) and the second number, 0f31, indicates the pci id, which indicates the model of the graphics unit. You can also use the lshw command to get the above information. Run the lshw command on your system. You will see the following output:
Find What Graphics Card Driver Is Used on Linux
To identify the name of the graphics card driver used on your system, you can use the lshw command shown below. You wI’ll see it output something like this:
The name of the graphics card driver is shown in driver=i915. After, you can check the details of the graphics card driver as follows: You will see it output something like this:
Check Hardware Acceleration
With hardware-based 3d acceleration, applications that need to draw 3d graphics can use the hardware directly to process and generate the graphics and speed up 3d rendering significantly. For this, the graphics card must support hardware acceleration, and the correct drivers must be installed on your system. You can use the glxinfo command to get the details of OpenGL: You will see an output like this:
The OpenGL renderer string points to MESA libraries which means that 3d rendering is being handled entirely inside software. This is going to be slow, and games wI’ll not work well.
Conclusion
I hope you now have enough knowledge to find the correct information of the graphics card installed on your system and that you can easily install the correct diver for the graphics card. Feel free to comment if you have any questions.
