Your graphics card is a number-crunching powerhouse. It’s what makes modern gaming so amazing. It’s a silicon beast that can recreate believable worlds, trace the paths of light to produce photorealistic images, and power the latest artificial intelligence engines. For most of us though, it’s mainly about gaming – something that the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) at the heart of your graphics card does incredibly well. It’s what they were designed to do.
How do you know which graphics card you have though? For something that is such a vital part of any system, particularly a gaming PC, it can be tricky to find out exactly what you’ve got. Thankfully, there are a couple of ways of unearthing this information, and it shouldn’t require you to open your machine and pull the thing out to try and read any tiny labels – although that’s always an option if the steps below don’t, for some reason, reveal the vital details.
If all you need is the name of your GPU, then the quickest way of find that out is via the Device Manager. Right-click the Start button and select Device Manager from the pop-up list and you'll be presented with a list of the hardware inside your machine.
Device Manager is a useful tool for spotting problems and for easily updating drivers for the various components that make up your system, but as far as your Graphics Card is concerned, you’ll simply be presented with a name. You’ll find this under the Display Adaptors entry. And in this example, all we know is that we have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Not particularly useful, but depending on what you need to find out, it may be enough.
Task Manager offers up plenty of useful information about your software and system, and anyone that has been using Windows for a while will know it’s a go-to utility to find out why things aren’t quite running as they should. It may be slightly surprising to discover that it houses some truly useful info about your graphics card, including its name, how much VRAM it has, your driver version and date, as well as the GPU's current temperature.
Right-click the Start Menu and select Task Manager from the list, or you can also hit [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] and select Task Manager, whichever you prefer. Click on the Performance entry on the left and then select your graphics card, which will probably be down as GPU 0. You’ll be presented with some graphs of its performance, with the name of your GPU in the top-right corner, and information about your GPU at the bottom. The driver date is a good one to have a quick check of, because if you haven’t updated your GPU drivers for a while, then you could be up for a performance boost or improved compatibility just by updating them. You can grab the latest drivers, depending on which graphics card you have, but heading to either the Nvidia, AMD, or Intel driver websites.
If you’re after slightly more information than just the GPU name, then the always-useful CPU-Z is a good option. CPU-Z can be downloaded from www.cpuid.com and it’s free, which helps. Once you’ve downloaded and unpacked it, run the executable and you’ll be presented with lots of information about your machine – this is a great tool for finding out details about your processor, your motherboard, and your memory.
You’ll find the information about your graphics card under the Graphics tab. Here we discover that the card is manufactured by Zotac as well as what the GPU’s TDP is, how much memory it has, and what the current core clock and memory clocks are running at. Not all this info is essential for normal day-to-day computing, but useful to know all the same. And it can help you to spot problems if the card is running a bit hot, or not running fast enough.
There you have it, three different ways to find out what graphics card is inside your system, all without having to open the case.
As a bonus you can also run Dxidag from the Run command ([Win] + R) to find out some basic information, although we’d recommend the techniques above first as this isn't quite as easy to understand.
