nvidia-smi
Shares rank 5 of 8 system monitors by recommenders
Recommended for checking VRAM use, hardware decode and power limits on NVIDIA GPUs, with the caveat that utilization can read 100% while the GPU is underused.
Recommended for checking VRAM use, hardware decode and power limits on NVIDIA GPUs, with the caveat that utilization can read 100% while the GPU is underused.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 56%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Power limiting to protect breakers
“You can use nvidia-smi to reduce the powerdraw of the card to just below what will trip the breaker.”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “In Edison’s Revenge, Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DC” “If you're not power limiting in nvidia-smi, start.”
Comment from 13 Jun 2026 in “RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8” Shows hardware decode activity
“column "dec" tells you whether there is hw decode happening”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare” Reports VRAM usage
“nvidia-smi is great for determining total VRAM usage”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Utilyze, an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Utilization reading can mislead
“It reports the fraction of time that any kernel is running on the GPU, which means a GPU can report 100% utilization”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 on Hacker News Gives numbers, not headroom
“nvtop and nvidia-smi give you the number but not the headroom.”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Utilyze, an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop” Long-standing unresolved issue
“Known pretty longstanding issue w nvidia still unresolved afaik”
Comment from 25 Jan 2026 in “nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days” Claimed deliberate downgrade of features
“deliberately DOWNGRADED software like nvidia-smi”
Comment from 25 Oct 2026 in “GPU-unlock: FP/BF16 instruction issue rate on Nvidia 3000's cards”
Other system monitors people recommend
The four most recommended other system monitors, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| btop | 38 | 11 | 78% | 7 | — | Approved |
| htop | 28 | 4 | 88% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Utilyze | 11 | 2 | 85% | 2 | — | — |
| Stats menu bar system monitor | 10 | 1 | 91% | 5 | — | Approved |
| nvidia-smiThis page | 5 | 4 | 56% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
8 of the 9 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“deliberately DOWNGRADED software like nvidia-smi”
“If you're not power limiting in nvidia-smi, start.”
“nvtop and nvidia-smi give you the number but not the headroom.”
“nvidia-smi is great for determining total VRAM usage”
“It reports the fraction of time that any kernel is running on the GPU, which means a GPU can report 100% utilization”
“You can use nvidia-smi to reduce the powerdraw of the card to just below what will trip the breaker.”
“column "dec" tells you whether there is hw decode happening”
“Known pretty longstanding issue w nvidia still unresolved afaik”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.