Querying Graphics Card Name

[Benjamin Goldenberg]

On Aug 12, 2:18 pm, Jorgen Grahn <grahn+n... at snipabacken.dyndns.org>
wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:58:54 -0000, Benjamin Goldenberg <bgoldenb... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Aug 9, 3:26 pm, Bjoern Schliessmann <usenet-
> > mail-0306.20.chr0n... at spamgourmet.com> wrote:
> >> Benjamin Goldenberg wrote:
> >> > 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.
>
> > 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.

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