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user3741675 avatar Ubuntu

What GPU is active and how to switch between them?

cn flag
user3741675

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

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?
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guiverc avatar
cn flag
guiverc
Only Ubuntu and official flavors of Ubuntu (https://ubuntu.com/download/flavours) are on-topic here, refer to https://askubuntu.com/help/on-topic where you'll find other SE sites where you question will be welcome if you don't want to use a Linux Mint forum. (*One advantage of Ubuntu is it's many support options, you opted for Linux Mint so take advantage of it's support options, or SE Unix & Linux*)
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user3741675 avatar
cn flag
user3741675
Sorry. I didn't know rules of this forum. By the way I will migrate to ubuntu because it has more resources to learn.
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Franco avatar Ubuntu
fr flag
Franco

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.

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user3741675 avatar
cn flag
user3741675
Thanks a lot. Your answer was really helpful. But why does the system info always show "Intel Corporation Skylake" as graphic card?
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cocomac avatar
cn flag
cocomac
@user3741675 Some CPU's, especially ones in laptops, will have integrated graphics, so the CPU can render graphics without needing to use a dedicated GPU. Skylake is the [processor microarchitecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)) for your CPU. I, for example, have a laptop with a CPU that has integrated graphics (Intel 630), and a dedicated NVIDIA GPU for tasks that need more GPU power, like Blender.
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