A CLI tool for check NVIDIA GPU usage: nvidia-smi

Published @2025-08-25 (Monday) Updated @2025-08-25 (Monday)

Table of Content

What Is nvidia-smi?

nvidia-smi is a GPU management CLI (Command Line Interface) tool provided by NVIDIA.
Its official name is NVIDIA System Management Interface, abbreviated as nvidia-smi.
With nvidia-smi, you can check GPU utilization, temperature, memory usage, driver version, and more from the command line.
If you use an NVIDIA GPU, this tool is typically installed together with the driver, so you usually do not need to install it yourself.

You can do following things with nvidia-smi.

View GPU utilization (overall usage and per-process occupancy)
Check GPU memory usage
Monitor temperature and power consumption
Display the driver version and CUDA version
See running processes and the GPU resources associated with them

The simplest command is nvidia-smi. Running it returns the current GPU specifications and usage information.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 555.42.02    Driver Version: 555.42.02    CUDA Version: 12.3     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------|
| GPU  Name            TCC/WDDM | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070  WDDM | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |              N/A |
| N/A   50C   P8     12W /  N/A |    320MiB / 12288MiB |      1%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

output example of nvidia-smi

When Is It Useful?

When you want to check specifications such as the installed NVIDIA driver version and the supported CUDA version
When you want to check or monitor current GPU usage

However, the “CUDA Version” shown in the table header may indicate the maximum CUDA version supported by the driver, so it may differ from the actual version installed.

You can refresh the information every second with an option like this :

nvidia-smi -l 1

Check the details on the official website or so.

What Is nvidia-smi?

When Is It Useful?

References