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Upgrading to the latest version of the proprietary Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu was pretty complicated a while back. You would either have to use the official Linux installer, which was not always reliable, at least for me, or use a bleeding edge PPA, like the Xorg Edgers PPA, which would upgrade multiple packages, most of which were unstable.

Thats no longer the case thanks to the Proprietary GPU Drivers PPA, which offers stable proprietary Nvidia graphics driver updates, without updating other libraries to unstable versions (some libraries may still be updated using this PPA, if they are needed by the drivers, but theres nothing unstable in the PPA).

Despite its name, the PPA only provides proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers updates, with no support for AMD or Intel.

Even though the PPA is probably the most stable way of upgrading to the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers version in Ubuntu, its still considered in testing. That means issues may still occur (though I didnt encounter any and Ive been using it for some time), so you should only use this PPA if you have experience with recovering your system from a failed graphics driver upgrade.

I should also mention that the PPA provides packages for all supported Ubuntu versions (16.10, 16.04, 15.10, 14.04 and 12.04). At the time Im writing this article, the PPA provides the latest long lived branch version (367.27) of the Nvidia graphics drivers for Ubuntu 16.10 and 16.04 and the latest short lived branch version (364.19) for Ubuntu 15.10, 14.04 and 12.04.

You can check the latest Nvidia Linux graphics drivers version by visiting THIS page.

To add the Proprietary GPU Drivers PPA in Ubuntu and update the software sources, use the following commands:

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

From System Settings or directly from the menu / Dash, open Software & Updates, click on the "Additional Drivers" tab, select the driver you want to use, and click "Apply changes":

You can also install the latest drivers using Synaptic or from the command line. To see the available versions, you can use:

apt-cache search nvidia

apt search nvidia

And look for the packages called "nvidia-VERSION", for instance "nvidia-367" for the latest 367.27 graphics drivers, and install it ("sudo apt install nvidia-VERSION").