Ubuntu – How to check if Ubuntu is using the NVIDIA graphics card

driversnvidiavideo-driver

The reason I'm asking is that none of the games I've installed through software center that require 3D accelartion like TORCS for instance will run. When I try to run then, nothing happens. I have a Dell Inspiron N5110 with a nVidia GeForce GT 525M.

I tried the following which I were some suggestions for people with similar problems:

lspci -v

Which gave me:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0df5 (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Dell Device 04ca
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
    Memory at f5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
    I/O ports at e000 [size=128]
    Expansion ROM at f6000000 [disabled] [size=512K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: nvidia
    Kernel modules: nvidia_current, nvidia_current_updates, nvidia, nouveau, nvidiafb

I also tried:

egrep -i " connected|card detect|primary dev" /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Which gave me:

[    20.873] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 connected

And:

nvidia-smi -a

Which gave:

NVIDIA: could not open the device file /dev/nvidiactl (No such file or directory).
Nvidia-smi has failed because it couldn't communicate with NVIDIA driver. Make sure that latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

I don't really understand what all this means.

Best Answer

I know the question is old, but I found a solution which I haven't found on any other topic.

Open a terminal and type

lspci -vnnn | perl -lne 'print if /^\d+\:.+(\[\S+\:\S+\])/' | grep VGA

Your output will be something like that:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) 

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Chelsea LP [Radeon HD 7730M] [1002:682f] (rev ff) (prog-if ff)

Now look for the [VGA controller] at the end of each device. Whichever device has it, is the active GPU. In my case it's the i7 processor (HD 4000) that's handling the work.

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