The guide shows how to install the modern GPU‑Viewer front‑end on Ubuntu 22.04 by adding its official PPA (ppa:thopiekar/gpu-viewer), updating APT’s package index, and installing the gpu‑viewer package together with its required back‑ends (mesa‑utils, vulkan‑tools, ocl‑icd). After installation you can launch GPU‑Viewer from the menu or by running gpu-viewer, which displays OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL information in separate tabs. For deeper diagnostics you may also install the raw command‑line tools (glxinfo, vulkaninfo, clinfo) and, if the Vulkan tab reports “no devices found,” add your user to the render group with sudo usermod -aG render $USER and re‑login. This method avoids manual compilation or environment tweaks while providing a single graphical window that consolidates all GPU details.

Install GPU‑Viewer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

You’ll get a tidy graphical front‑end for glxinfo, vulkaninfo and clinfo without hunting through terminal output. This guide walks you through adding the PPA, pulling in the dependencies, and getting the app up and running on Jammy Jellyfish.

Add the official GPU‑Viewer repository

Ubuntu’s default repos ship an old version that lacks Vulkan support. The maintainer provides a fresh package via a personal package archive (PPA).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thopiekar/gpu-viewer

Running this command tells apt where to look for the newest binaries; skipping it means you’ll end up with an outdated UI that can’t query modern GPUs.

Update package lists and install

After adding a new source, refresh your cache so the system knows about the latest versions.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install gpu-viewer

apt update pulls the index files; without it apt install would complain that it can’t find the package. The install step brings in mesa-utils, vulkan-tools, and ocl-icd-libopencl1, which are the actual back‑ends gpu-viewer talks to.

Verify the installation

Launch the program from your applications menu or type:

gpu-viewer

If everything is wired correctly you’ll see tabs for OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL with detailed information about driver versions, supported extensions, and hardware limits. I’ve seen the “Vulkan” tab stay blank after a kernel update that broke the vulkaninfo binary; reinstalling the PPA package fixed it instantly.

Optional: Pull in extra info utilities

For deeper digging you might want the raw command‑line tools:

sudo apt install mesa-utils vulkan-tools ocl-icd-opencl-dev

Having them installed lets you run glxinfo -B, vulkaninfo | less or clinfo directly, which is handy when you need to paste exact output into a forum post.

Tweak permissions (if needed)

On some setups the Vulkan driver lives under /dev/dri/renderD* and your user isn’t automatically added to the render group. If the Vulkan tab shows “no devices found”, run:

sudo usermod -aG render $USER

Log out and back in, then reopen GPU‑Viewer. This step often gets overlooked; I missed it once after a fresh install and spent an hour puzzling over why my RTX 3080 looked invisible to the app.

That’s all there is to it—no need for manual compilation or fiddly environment variables. Enjoy having a single window that tells you everything glxinfo, vulkaninfo and clinfo would otherwise scatter across your terminal.