Follow

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

By pressing the Subscribe button, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Contact

What GPU is active and how to switch between them?

I installed linux mint yesterday and I have some choppy scrolling issues that I think, that is because of the graphic card.
I want to know which graphic card is in use.
I tested a lot of commands and tools. Let’s have a look at some of them:

glxinfo, lspci, nvidia-smi

neofetch result

MEDevel.com: Open-source for Healthcare and Education

Collecting and validating open-source software for healthcare, education, enterprise, development, medical imaging, medical records, and digital pathology.

Visit Medevel

system info

Another command I used is lshow:

ehsan@ehsan-Lenovo:~$ sudo lshw -c display
  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520]
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 07
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
       resources: irq:128 memory:92000000-92ffffff memory:a0000000-afffffff ioport:5000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff
  *-display
       description: 3D controller
       product: GM108M [GeForce 920MX]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
       version: a2
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
       resources: irq:131 memory:93000000-93ffffff memory:80000000-8fffffff memory:90000000-91ffffff ioport:3000(size=128)

As you can see glxinfo shows that NVIDIA is installed.
lspi and my system info shows that intel skylake is running.
neofetch shows that I have 3 GPUs!

It is confusing for me. I have three questions.

  1. Which GPU is active right now?
  2. How could I switch between them? For example how could I use NVIDIA all the time?
  3. Which GPU is better to use?

>Solution :

I can see NVIDIA driver is running. So you could check which GPU you are using with prime-select:

prime-select query

This tells you if you are using NVIDIA (nvidia), integrated graphics (intel), or a combination of both (on-demand). You can choose one of them by running prime-select with one of those keywords. For using always nvidia:

prime-select nvidia

Which one is best for you depends on how do you want to use the GPU. I personally choose on-demand for not loading too much the GPU and use it for training Deep Learning models. If I would use the computer for gaming or stuff like Google Chrome with GPU acceleration, I would set it to nvidia.

Add a comment

Leave a Reply

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

By pressing the Subscribe button, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Discover more from Dev solutions

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading