Basic Commands to Check and Identify NVIDIA Devices

Document Scope

This document will cover a few of the basic commands used to identify the NVIDIA devices in a system. Determining the hardware installed when you don't already have that information can be a useful step in identifying the best path to resolving any hardware issues you're experiencing, including how to find the necessary drivers you may need to ensure your hardware is performing as expected.

3 basic ways to check NVIDIA hardware in Linux

Assuming your NVIDIA driver is properly installed and functioning you can use the three below commands to gather information about your GPUs. Depending on the command, this could include (but is not limited to) information like the PCI Bus ID, fan speed and card temperature. If your NVIDIA driver states that it is having issues communicating with your installed hardware, then you most likely need to re-install your NVIDIA driver. Consult the NVIDIA Driver Download page to determine the most appropriate version of the driver for your setup.

Detect NVIDIA GPU(s):

nvidia-smi

Detect NVLink(s) (if you have them installed):

nvidia-smi nvlink --status

Detect physically installed devices that includes ‘nvidia’:

lspci | grep -i nvidia

Special note about lspci output:

When using lspci to locate a NVIDIA Graphics Card, it will instead return a PCI-e Bus ID at the start of the line (refers to the specific board slot where a GPU is installed) and a vendor specific ID at the end of the line (2204 in the below example).

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 2204 (rev a1) 
21:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 2204 (rev a1)

Using the table at NVIDIA’s open-source GitHub, we can decipher this vendor ID to determine that the card is a GeForce RTX 3090. This ID *could* be up to three alphanumeric "words" long; per the previously linked table a Quadro RTX 8000 would have a vendor ID of 1E30 1028 129E. This ID can be helpful in the event you are gathering hardware info and the installed driver is not able to communicate with the cards to pull the info directly.