How do I install the drivers for my Nvidia GTX 970?

Question

I have recently installed a Nvidia GTX 970, and from there on I could only select a tiny resolution under elementary.

Answer 1

First we should probably blacklist anything that could conflict. You don't have to do this, but a bad update later might do some damage otherwise.

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

At the end of the file add the following lines:

blacklist nouveau
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivafb
blacklist rivatv
blacklist vga16fb

Then simply run the following commands.

sudo apt install nvidia-375
sudo reboot

You can check this is working with

lewis@Comrade-Loki:~$ nvidia-smi
Sat Apr  1 22:22:55 2017       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 375.39                 Driver Version: 375.39                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 970     Off  | 0000:01:00.0      On |                  N/A |
|  9%   58C    P5    26W / 200W |   1171MiB /  4036MiB |     11%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID  Type  Process name                               Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1118    G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                             419MiB |
|    0      2413    G   gala                                           245MiB |
|    0      3541    G   ...s-passed-by-fd --v8-snapshot-passed-by-fd   503MiB |
|    0     13387    G   /usr/bin/nvidia-settings                         0MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+