How can I monitor ARC GPU's VRAM usage in Linux Mint

[NineMeow]

I initialized two GPUs on my computer, one is UHD 630 and the other is ARC A770(Resizable BAR ON).

I have tried ATOP, HTOP, intel_gpu_top, etc. They didn't show me the VRAM usage of my A770.

[Jean_Intel]

Hello NineMeow,

Thank you for posting in the Intel Communities. We see that you are having issues finding a way to monitor ARC GPU's VRAM usage in Linux Mint. We will help you on this matter, but we will further review this information internally, and we will post back as soon as we have more details. Please allow us some time to check this.

Best regards,

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello NineMeow,

We appreciate your patience. Unfortunately, currently, there is no Intel tool to monitor VRAM in Linux. However, we have passed your feedback to the Arc Control Developer team to have a similar solution in this Operating System, though we can't promise any estimated time or a particular outcome.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Best regards,

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[DeanL]

Hi There!!! Are you using Conky?   I've been experimenting with exposing GPU values to Conky....In talking with another Arc user....he has tried this:

Sure, I can help you with that. Here are the command-line commands you can use to monitor the temperature, memory, and GPU speeds of your Intel Arc-based video card:

To get the temperature of your video card, you can use the following command:

cat /sys/class/drm/card0/thermal_zone0/temp

To get the memory usage of your video card, you can use the following command:

cat /sys/class/drm/card0/memory/used

To get the GPU clock speed of your video card, you can use the following command:

cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/clock_mhz

You can then input this information into your Conky script to monitor your video card in real time.

Here is an example of how you can use this information in your Conky script:

${color yellow}Intel Arc-based video card:
${color}
GPU temperature: ${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/thermal_zone0/temp}°C
GPU memory usage: ${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/memory/used} MB
GPU clock speed: ${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/clock_mhz} MHz

This will display the temperature, memory usage, and GPU clock speed of your Intel Arc-based video card in your Conky window.

I hope this helps!

In my case, this resulted in no output, so I started looking in the /sys/class/drm  and in my case, I got some output with:

${color3}Temp:${color0} ${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/gt/gt0/throttle_reason_thermal} °C${goto 145}${color3}Mem: ${color0}${goto 185}${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/gt/gt0/media_freq_factor} MB
${color3}Freq:${color0} ${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/gt_act_freq_mhz} Mhz

So, I'm not getting temp readings, but a variable value from:  {exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/clock_mhz}

That's the best I can offer right now....I play with getting readings now & again. I would be VERY interesting if any of the Intel devs would like to step in here & enlighten us a bit more.......Hint..Hint  😉

[NineMeow]

Thanks! I will give it a try.

[DeanL]

Sorry....wrong copy/paste....I'm getting what looks like the right values for MB clock Freq:    ${exec cat /sys/class/drm/card0/gt_act_freq_mhz} Mhz

[DeanL]

Again--Frequency....not MB

[Jean_Intel]

Hello Everyone,

We see that fellow community members have jumped in the thread. As mentioned before, there is no Intel software to monitor VRAM in Linux-based Operating System. Nevertheless, you can try the recommended commands and scripts from @DeanL, but it would be recommended that you contact Linux Mint support or the Conky developers for additional information and support for their software.

We have shared the feedback with the appropriate team; however, we can't promise any ETA or outcome.

Best regards,

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello Everyone,

Since we haven't received a response in a while, we will proceed to close the thread. If you require additional information, please open a new question as this thread will no longer be monitored.

Best regards,

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[NineMeow]

I have used xpu-smi for a while. It seems that the program can't support ARC client GPU well so it only shows power(watt) and VRAM usage. But this is quite enough for me now.

Thank you, everyone!

[Xanph]

Thank you NineMeow, very useful.

Intel really should have their own resource monitoring tool because of their ARC line. I'm now using intel-gpu-top which isn't even made by intel and was last updated 9 years ago, and now have to use xpu on top!

For anyone wanting direct copy and paste instructions for xpu-smi (tested in Ubuntu), here they are:

Step 1: Ensure you have your GPU drivers installed - Client or Data Centre.

Client install: As you have installed the client GPU drivers you will need to run:

Data Centre: You will already have xpu-smi installed

sudo apt install xpu-smi

Step 2: Run discovery on your cards to get the device ID for the specific card you want stats on.

xpu-smi discovery

Step 3: Get the stats for your card, replacing 0 with your device id.

xpu-smi stats -d 0