I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04.1 on my brand new, self-built, desktop PC. It has an i5-4690k, 8GB DDR3-1600MHz, and an EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti FTW:
I have pretty abysmal frame-rates on everything (Hammerwatch & Minecraft currently), so I figured I'd look into getting the proprietary drivers, which I was told are supposed to improve FPS quite a bit.
However, when I go to Software & Updates > Additional Drivers I get nothing:
I noticed on this question here (describes my issue almost exactly the same) that I might have to add the xorg-edgers PPA for them to show up. However, I was under the impression that the X-SWAT & Xorg-edgers PPAs were dangerous for system stability.
Is this the case, or do I have to add one or the other of these PPAs to get the drivers?
As a side note, I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu is, indeed, using my GTX 750 Ti, as the output of lspci -vnnn | perl -lne 'print if /^\d+\:.+(\[\S+\:\S+\])/' | grep VGA returns this:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GM107 [GeForce GTX 750 Ti] [10de:1380] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
EDIT:
It would appear that this is actually a fairly common bug, just from my googling about.
Here's a Launchpad bug report that describes it perfectly. They mention that adding the xorg-edgers PPA and installing the nvidia-340 drivers resolves this issue.
However, I'm still a tad nervous about enabling a testing repository – is it safe enough to enable the repository, install the driver, and then disable the repository?
Best Answer
I ended up downloading the newest drivers straight from NVIDIA from here and installing them manually. Obviously, this won't automatically update in the future (AFAIK).
The path I had to take was actually quite convoluted, involving adding the
nomodesetflag to GRUB, then killinglightdm, and then running the installer. I followed some suggestions from here and was provided some help from @Mateo and @Seth in chat.