What Does the nvidia-smi Command Do?

nvidia-smi -q is a command-line tool that provides detailed diagnostics and status information for NVIDIA GPUs installed on a Linux system.

✅ What It Does

It queries and displays extensive GPU information, including:

  • Driver version
  • CUDA version
  • GPU name and UUID
  • Temperature
  • Fan speed
  • Memory usage
  • ECC errors
  • Power usage
  • Clock speeds
  • Running processes using the GPU

✅ Usage Example

nvidia-smi -q

Output: A long, verbose report covering the health and status of each GPU in the system.

If you want it to be more readable, pipe it through less:

nvidia-smi -q | less

✅ Real-World Use Cases

  • Troubleshooting GPU overheating or underclocking
  • Monitoring ECC memory errors on data centre GPUs
  • Checking if a process is hogging GPU memory
  • Validating that driver and CUDA versions are correct

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