How can I check what kind of video card I have?

Solution 1:

sudo lspci|grep VGA

shows me I have a:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc NI Whistler [AMD Radeon HD 6600M Series]

If you want even more information you can install mesa-utils . Besides the obvious things:

$ glxinfo|grep renderer
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon 6600M and 6700M Series

$ glxinfo|grep vendor
server glx vendor string: ATI  
client glx vendor string: ATI  
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.  

It will show about 3 pages of information about the driver in use.

Solution 2:

Besides lspci you can use hwinfo which is quite a useful tool for getting detailed information about all kinds of hardware components, and their drivers, on your system.

By default hwinfo prints out quite long list of information but you can specify what you want by:

hwinfo --gfxcard

Other options are:

all,  bios,  block,  bluetooth,  braille,  bridge, camera, 
cdrom, chipcard,  cpu,  disk,  dsl,  dvb,  fingerprint,  floppy,
framebuffer,  gfxcard,  hub,  ide,  isapnp, isdn, joystick, 
keyboard, memory, modem, monitor, mouse, netcard,  network,  
partition,  pci,  pcmcia, pcmcia-ctrl, pppoe, printer, scanner, 
scsi, smp, sound, storage-ctrl, sys, tape,  tv,  usb,  usb-ctrl,  
vbe, wlan, and zip.

For more information

man hwinfo