There are two kind of nVidia drivers. The official, proprietary, drivers and the unofficial, open source ones called "nouveau" (AKA "nv"). The latter version is usually shipped by default with most distributions, and are nowhere near usable for any 3d application.
Downloading the drivers[]
Some distributions make official precompiled drivers available through their packaging system. As not all of them do, those will not be mentioned here.
The latest stable branch is 180.x. You may find them on the official nVidia website. Occasionally, the page is not up-to-date - you will always find the latest driver vesion on the FTP repository (x86-64 / x86). You will need the one called NVIDIA-Linux-[PLATFORM]-[VERSION]-pkg2.run.