I have just ordered a GTX 1660 OC edition 6GB GDDR5 and I have Ubuntu 18.04 x64 with Cinnamon UI.
I would like to know which driver do you advise to install for that GPU?
E.g. do you think I should use mesa (e.g. this guide)? I heard a lot of improvements was made for GTX 1660 from mesa 19.3.
I would like to avoid any tearing/lagging issue I have read online about NVIDIA + Ubuntu + Cinnamon.
Thanks
I have a GTX1650 which is not the same, but close enough and from the same family. I think it depends on the kernel version you use. In my case, for kernel 4.15 the NVIDIA 430 proprietary driver worked fine. One bug was that there was a crash when maximizing and then minimizing videos in Firefox.
You can have another kernel version in 18.04 if you use Hardware Enablement Stack (you can read more in the official wiki). I tried to upgrade to 19.10 having the new kernel versions and it didn't work well with any of the available drivers: 430, 435, 440 and nouveau. Some problems occurred at login and with HDMI sound, so I wouldn't recommend it.
However, migrating to 20.04 with kernel 5.40 and NVIDIA driver 440 works better than ever, even the small bug in Firefox is gone. If you can consider upgrading to 20.04 I would probably recommend it, but make a backup of all your data in case you encounter any problems so you can roll back. You can create some USB with the default version of your system if you have Ubuntu preinstalled or just make a Snapshot with Timeshift to reinstall and go back to the previous state, just backup your personal data somewhere else (Deja Dup) because it is not a good idea to include home folders to a snapshot.
As for Mesa drivers, the article you shared is quite outdated. Most of the good NVIDIA drivers are available through the system itself and as of 19.10 they are included to the ISO so they are not downloaded separately. However, not all versions have the newer ones (I think 18.04 only has 435 as the largest version, but as of 19.10 you have 440).
So, you can check what is available for you and also the recommended ones with:
ubuntu-drivers devices
to check if you have the propietary ones installed:
nvidia-smi
or dkms status to see the modules loaded in kernel (it will show the driver version normally).
You can search drivers to install via:
apt search nvidia-driver
or
apt-cache search nvidia-driver
and install via sudo apt install nvidia-driver-xxx replace xxx with version, of course. If you agree with the recommendation provided by ubuntu-drivers devices command you can use sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall, it will install recommended ones (all not only VGA if you have any other difference). If you already have any drivers installed you need to delete them first before to install the newer version, better if you have any CPU built-in graphic.
All the installation can be done via GUI as well using more drivers menu in Software Updater, but in my experience it doesn't always work well and shell is much more effective way to manage it.
The lagging/tearing issues would be from installing the wrong drivers or not installing them right (my assumption). As for which drivers to use, https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us input your info and see what they recommend.
