I had this same issue, but none of the answers here fixed it for me. I eventually fixed it by doing this:
sudo modprobe nvidia
Which gave me a warning that nvidia_319
was actually blacklisted somehow...? So I did:
$ cd /etc/modprobe.d
$ sudo fgrep nvidia * | fgrep blacklist
which informed me that my earlier install of bumblebee was breaking the regular nvidia drivers. So I did:
$ sudo apt-get remove bumblebee
$ sudo rm bumblebee.conf
And that fixed the problem. If you have this problem, it may not be this exact issue with bumbleebee, but if your nvidia drivers are somehow blacklisted, this method will tell you what is blacklisting them and why, and you can attempt to deal with it that way. The "Additional Drivers" menu and jockey-text -l
will not inform you that this could be a blacklist problem.
If the above or any of the other answers do not help, make sure that nouveau is blacklisted and then reinstall the nvidia drivers. Installing nvidia should do this for you, by making a file something like this (but if it doesn't, copy this one and make sure to blacklist all the drivers but the one you don't want to use)
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf:
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96
alias nvidia nvidia-current