Xorg – How to Check Information of Installed Video Drivers

xorg

My CPU usage is high when I do trivial things such as scrolling through a PDF file. So I think my video driver is not properly installed.

I want to confirm that by checking the information of my currently installed video driver, such as if there's a driver installed and what version it is. Then I could decide whether to install a new one if it is not up to date.

On Windows, I could use the device manager, how to do that on Ubuntu Linux? I don't expect a GUI solution for this. Command line will be just good enough.

Best Answer

In Linux, there is two parts for the video driver, the kernel part and the X server part.

  1. Let's identify your hardware first. By typing lspci | grep VGA in a terminal, you should see a line with you graphic card description (even if not configured at all).
  2. Let's check the correct kernel driver is loaded find /dev -group video.
  3. Let's check the correct X driver is loaded glxinfo | grep -i vendor.

If you want more help, I would like the result of following commands: (Remember, never trust command line that people ask you to execute without knowing what it does.)

lspci | grep VGA
lsmod | grep "kms\|drm"
find /dev -group video
cat /proc/cmdline
find /etc/modprobe.d/
cat /etc/modprobe.d/*kms*
ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf
glxinfo | grep -i "vendor\|rendering"
grep LoadModule /var/log/Xorg.0.log
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