How can I figure out if a video driver is loaded in linux?

Question

I've got a Xubuntu installation on a Dell Latitude C800 and I'm pretty sure I've read that one should set the display depth to only 16bit in order to use the ATI Mobility M4 graphics card.

Is there a possibility to see if the graphics card has been loaded with the correct drivers?

Solution

If you know what you're looking for, you can use lsmod to list currently loaded modules.

lsmod is a trivial program which nicely formats the contents of the /proc/modules, showing what kernel modules are currently loaded.

Another option is to check X11 logs (/var/log/Xorg.0.log). On my system, this file contains the following line:

(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"

Comments

[quack quixote]

further that logfile should tell you exactly how X configured the display, so you can tell the bitdepth -- look for a line like "(--) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp"