How to find correct driver for updating NVIDIA on Ubuntu16.04 LTS?

Question

I am following the instructions in How to install the latest Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus to update the NVIDIA drivers, and lspci -vnn | grep VGA outputs:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:1b06] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:1b80] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

From PCI Device 10de:1b06 and PCI Device 10de:1b80, I think I need GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, both of which I cannot find at the driver download page

Answer 1

Ubuntu 16.04

Ubuntu 16.04 has less drivers available than 18.04.

With a quick search at https://packages.ubuntu.com/. I found that the latest driver available was nvidia-384.

Using the official LTS packages, nvidia-384 is the newest driver you can install.

However, driver 440 is available at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/results/159360/ (Apr 07, 2020).

This download is not a package but an installer that will verify your system for compatible drivers and should install the latest version.

The installer is run through the terminal.

Note: You may need to change the file permissions with `chmod u+x filename' and then execute.

Ubuntu 18.04

As ubuntu 18.04 already has updated drivers I offer a GUI and terminal installation:

Option 1: Graphical User Interface (GUI) method

Get to the so called Additional Drivers window. This is a tab inside an application called Software and Updates. Bellow example on how it should look like.

Note: I recommend selecting the latest nvidia-driver-440 (as of May 30, 2020 for ubuntu 18.04) unless you have specific need for a different version. I am using an SDK that requires the use of proprietary driver 435.

Option 2: Bash Terminal

In a new terminal window, find current available drivers with command

apt-cache search nvidia-driver

Only worry about the drivers that begin with nvidia-driver. In the example about the newest driver would be nvidia-driver-440.

Install the driver (will require root privileges) sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-###. Replace ### with the respective number found in your search 440 for my example.

Reboot computer

The computer should require a reboot let the video driver changes take effect.

Answer 2

Here is the answer for your query.

Proprietary : Owned/Provided by some company (In your case these are the 
              Graphics drivers provided by Nvidia)

Open Source: Developed/Provided by an open source community.

If you want to use CUDA (nVidia's stuff for executing functions on the GPU), you should use the proprietary driver.

If you want to use OpenCL (something like CUDA, developed by Khronos), you have to use the open source driver.

To install latest drivers add PPA :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt update 

Now, find Software & Updates under System Settings and select the required driver version form the Additional Drivers tab, select the driver and click Apply Changes. Restart and Enjoy!

PS: Sometimes the best driver version doesn't seem to work well, so you must check whether you're enjoying all the functionalities provided and whether it contain bugs and please do check whether nvidia-prime is installed because it comes handy in most of the situations where bugs lead to a black screen.

Additionally In above post MeganFoxz suggested only and just to run sudo apt-get update and sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall