Additional Drivers page does not see my graphics card 16.04

Question

I am using a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04 with all of the updates installed. When I go to additional drivers it simply shows one option with "Unknown: unkown".

The model is a Thinkpad P50s, it is supposed to have a m500m, but when I run

lshw -C display


I receive this
 *-display UNCLAIMED
   description: 3D controller
   product: GM108GLM [Quadro K620M]
   vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:06:00.0
   version: a2
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:f1000000-f1ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:d000(size=128)

I'm unsure of what else to do. I had this problem before and used bumblebee, but I would just like to install the drivers and have the card work. It is my only gripe with Ubuntu.

How do I make the card show up in additional drivers?

Solution

After some time I found the proper way to do this online. This is the webpage, but I'll explain it here incase that link dies one day.

This will not show the card in the addition drivers page, and this bricked my machine the first time I did it. It bricked because I installed the wrong driver version the first time, so back up your data.

1) Check the PPA site for the latest nvidia driver here and check that your graphics card supports it (search the nvidia driver site for the supported cards. check your card with the command:

sudo lshw -c display

2) I didn't need to do this, but remove all nvidia drivers with

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

3) add the PPA and then update

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update

4) Install the driver! Replace the X with the driver number

sudo apt-get install nvidia-XXX

Reboot your computer. Check if this is working with

lsmod | grep nvidia

if this returns nothing then the install failed, as the website indicates.

This is a problem that I had been trying to fix for months. I downgraded all the way from Ubuntu 18 to 16 for this to work.