Hack your graphics
Switch drivers, interrogate GPU memory, try and keep the magic smoke from escaping into the atmosphere…
T here are some great tools for probing, tweaking and otherwise tinkering with GPU on Linux. Most of these are vendor-specific.
Intel provide a number of utilities via the
intel-gputools
package. Once installed you can run $ sudo intel_gpu_top to see how busy your GPU is, how much power it’s using, whether hardware video codecs are in use and more. It’s also handy if you get confused about which ‘Gen’ your graphics are. If only we’d known about it two pages back…
INTEL MIXES THINGS UP
“The release of the more powerful Alchemist cards might end two decades of the AMD/Nvidia duopoly.”
AMD’s Catalyst Control Centre on Windows enables you to overclock your GPU and its memory, as well as tweak fan profiles. Corectrl on Linux makes it possible to do exactly the same thing, but probably with much less bloat. Corectrl is available on Fedora, Arch Linux’s AUR or you can build it yourself from source see (https:// gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl). For Ubuntu there’s a handy PPA (https://launchpad.net/~ernstp/+archive/ubuntu/mesarc), where you’ll also find newer builds of Mesa, libdrm and the amdgpu driver for X.org.
CoreCtrl enables you to tweak all kinds of settings, which some would say you have no business tweaking.
Another AMD tool popular with developers and tweakers on Windows is its Developer Tool Suite. This has been open sourced (as part of its longstanding GPUopen initiative) and can be obtained from https:// gpuopen.com/tools. The suite is aimed more at developers than anyone else, but anyone who’s even the slightest bit curious as to what their GPU is up to should find at least some of it interesting. The suite includes GPU Profiler, Memory Visualizer, GPU Analyzer and Developer Portal. That last one sounds a little scary, tbh.