Go to nVidia and download the correct video driver for your video card

This is how you find out what video card you have:

sudo lshw -C video | grep product:

Remove your existing video driver

sudo apt-get remove nvidea*

​Blacklist nouveau drivers

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf

Add the following lines:

    blacklist nouveau
    blacklist lbm-nouveau
    options nouveau modeset=0
    alias nouveau off
    alias lbm-nouveau off

Save the file

Edit grub so you can restart ubuntu in text mode without loading the video drivers

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Comment out the line that says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Add the following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

When you are finished with the edit it sould look like this:

# GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

save grub - then run sudo update-grub

Reboot Ubuntu:

sudo shutdown -r now

Login to ubuntu

change directories to where you nvidia file is located

cd Downloads

To run the nvidia install type sudo sh "and the name of the file" without quotes

Example: sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.79.run

Use the defaults

Edit grub again so it will restart in graphics mode

This time you want to uncomment GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
and comment out GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

It should look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
# GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"​

save the file

Update grub:

sudo update-grub

Reboot ubuntu