Ubuntu – Is the graphics card in use or not

13.10atidriversgraphics

I have a Samsung Series 7 NP730U3E which is running Ubuntu Gnome 13.10. This computer have an Intel Core i5 3337U an AMD Radeon HD 8570M on the inside. Ubuntu 13.10 is said to have driver support for this graphics card, but I am not sure whether or not this is the case.

When I check System Settings > Details it says "Graphics: Intel® Ivybridge Mobile" and lspci | grep VGA returns VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09).

But lshw -c video returns

*-display 
    description: Display controller
    product: Mars [Radeon HD 8730M]
    vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
    physical id: 0
    bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
    version: 00
    width: 64 bits
    clock: 33MHz
    capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list rom
    configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
    resources: irq:47 memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f7e00000-f7e3ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:f7e40000-f7e5ffff
*-display
    description: VGA compatible controller
    product: 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
    vendor: Intel Corporation
    physical id: 2
    bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
    version: 09
    width: 64 bits
    clock: 33MHz
    capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
    configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
    resources: irq:46 memory:f7800000-f7bfffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:f000(size=64)

What is the case? Is my graphics card is use, or do my laptop have undiscovered powers yet to yield?

Best Answer

To tell if your graphics card is in use you must run the following command: glxinfo | grep OpenGL. If it says Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe, then it's using your CPU instead of your GPU. If it's says it's using the Intel GPU, then you'll want to disable that in the BIOS and make sure your video cable is connected to your GPU.

Radeon HD 8570M is a GCN/RadeonSI graphics card so you will want to go to AMD's website and download/install Catalyst 13.11.

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