Querying Graphics Card Name

[Benjamin Goldenberg]

Hello,
I would like to find out the name of the graphics card of the machine
my program is running on. I have looked into the pyopengl module, and
using them to query the card, but it seems like there ought to be a
simpler way to find this out without setting up a glcontext. Does
anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Benjamin

 

[Bjoern Schliessmann]

I would like to find out the name of the graphics card of the
machine my program is running on. I have looked into the pyopengl
module, and using them to query the card, but it seems like there
ought to be a simpler way to find this out without setting up a
glcontext. Does anyone have any ideas?

You could execute glxinfo and look for the renderer string. If
that's sharp enough for your purpose. Another option is lspci.

Regards,


Björn

 

[Benjamin Goldenberg]

You could execute glxinfo and look for the renderer string. If
that's sharp enough for your purpose. Another option is lspci.

I should have clarified. I would like a cross platform implementation,
Windows and *nix. It doesn't seem as if glxinfo is available under
Windows, at least not without installing X11 under cygwin. If
necessary, I can write the *nix and Windows queries separately.

Thanks,
Benjamin

 

[Richard Jones]

I would like to find out the name of the graphics card of the machine
my program is running on. I have looked into the pyopengl module, and
using them to query the card, but it seems like there ought to be a
simpler way to find this out without setting up a glcontext. Does
anyone have any ideas?

You need a context if you're going to ask OpenGL to tell you what the card
is. To find out any other way would be highly platform-specific, possibly
though looking in the /proc directory on Linux, and who-knows-where-else on
other platforms.

Also, have a look at tools/info.py in the pyglet project
<http://www.pyglet.org/>


Richard

 

[Benjamin Goldenberg]

You need a context if you're going to ask OpenGL to tell you what the card
is. To find out any other way would be highly platform-specific, possibly
though looking in the /proc directory on Linux, and who-knows-where-else on
other platforms.

Also, have a look at tools/info.py in the pyglet project
<http://www.pyglet.org/>

Richard

Thanks for the reference, but I was unable to find tools/info.py in
pyglet. What would be the full path to this file?
Thanks.

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

I should have clarified. I would like a cross platform implementation,
Windows and *nix. It doesn't seem as if glxinfo is available under
Windows, at least not without installing X11 under cygwin. If
necessary, I can write the *nix and Windows queries separately.

Yeah, but ...
- what if there isn't one?
- what if there are several?
- what if there *is* one, but your user is sitting by a remote machine,
not using the card at all?

Your method will, no matter how you choose, fail sooner or later,
so you'd better plan for that.

What is your reason to do this, by the way? Remember what Homer
Simpson said: if something appears to be hard, it is simply not worth
doing. And I mean that semi-seriously.

/Jorgen

 

[Benjamin Goldenberg]

Yeah, but ...
- what if there isn't one?
- what if there are several?
- what if there *is* one, but your user is sitting by a remote machine,
not using the card at all?

Your method will, no matter how you choose, fail sooner or later,
so you'd better plan for that.

What is your reason to do this, by the way? Remember what Homer
Simpson said: if something appears to be hard, it is simply not worth
doing. And I mean that semi-seriously.

These are for some internal automation scripts for the company I work
for. We do development for specific graphics cards, all of which are
OpenGL 2.0 compatible. In order to automate aspects of our building
and testing systems, we need to know which graphics card the software
is being built on. Hopefully, that makes some sense.

-Benjamin