Are nvidia drivers necessary?

Posted by Shubham Chaudhary on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Shubham Chaudhary
Published on 2014-06-03T21:11:24Z Indexed on 2014/06/03 21:40 UTC
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Filed under:

nvidia

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graphics

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fonts

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nvidia-prime

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nvidia-settings

The new Ubuntu 14.04 comes with nvidia driver options. My system(Dell XPS) uses nvidia-331. For starters it messed up my text font size. It is so freakishly small with nvidia drivers on.

So my question is:

Are these drivers really necessary?

What performance gain do they provide?

Will it help me save some battery life?

Basically what are these drivers doing that I was missing before (with nouveau I guess)?

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