hw-smi v1.0

It was a long journey, now my fun side project is done and opensourced!

How much VRAM bandwidth does an application or a game pull? Is the traffic over PCIe a bottleneck? What's the CPU/GPU load, RAM/VRAM occupation, temperatures, power draw, clock frequencies? hw-smi works with all CPUs and all Nvidia/AMD/Intel GPUs, on both Windows and Linux.

There are lots of cool hardware monitoring tools already - but they all are either OS-specific, only for CPU or GPU, only for one particular vendor's GPUs, and none of them tell you the VRAM/PCIe bandwidth to give clues about application bottlenecks. 2 years ago I thought to myself: I can do this better. Hardest part was testing the vendor APIs, every single counter, and I needed hardware for that. That was fun, I found & reported lots of bugs. Accordingly I had to do extensive hardening against broken API counters, entire chains of fallbacks just to get one value reliably. Testing, testing, testing!

But it was all worth it. Now I share this powerful tool with the world, for free. Have fun!

How to run?

Windows

• Download hw-smi.exe or hw-smi-hud.exe (version with graphical on-screen HUD).
• Double-click (you will be asked to run as administrator, this is required for some Intel GPU counters).
• Alternatively, run in Windows CMD via

  hw-smi.exe
  hw-smi.exe --graphs
  hw-smi.exe --bars
  hw-smi.exe --help

Linux

• Clone from GitHub:

  git clone https://github.com/ProjectPhysX/hw-smi.git && cd hw-smi

• Compile:

  chmod +x make.sh
  ./make.sh

• Run:

  sudo bin/hw-smi
  sudo bin/hw-smi --graphs
  sudo bin/hw-smi --bars
  sudo bin/hw-smi --help

• Note that it will also work without sudo. However, some telemetry counters on Intel GPUs are not available without sudo.