Introduction
Sometimes when you are connected to a computer or you are using a new machine it's neccesary to check how much memory has your video card. In this tutorial we will explain different ways to obtain the available memory of you VGA.
Variation 1: lspci from command line and grep
Just execute lspci and grep the VGA string:
lspci -v -s $(lspci | grep VGA | cut -d" " -f 1) | grep " prefetchable"
this will return the device slot in the first column as this output shows:
This will output the following:
Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
In our case we have 256M of video memory.
Alternative 2: Only for NVIDIA video cards
When you install Nvidia drivers it comes with the command nvidia-smi, which returns a lot of information from the video card:
nvidia-smi
The output is easy to read, we got the following output outout:
Tue Mar 14 17:30:50 2017
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 375.26 Driver Version: 375.26 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 GeForce GTX 660 On | 0000:01:00.0 N/A | N/A |
| 30% 32C P8 N/A / N/A | 1059MiB / 1998MiB | N/A Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| 0 Not Supported |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
As we can see the total memory is 2gb.