I’ve included as much details I can, including troubleshooting steps and checks but I would like to hear your part of the story, so leave a comment with your findings and issues. For normal users, you should just stop here and enjoy your nice smooth NVIDIA graphics. You use the first guide to install NVIDIA Driver on Kali Linux 1.1.0 kernel 3.18.
How to Install NVIDIA Kernel Module CUDA and Pyrit in Kali Linux.The first step is to fully update your Kali Linux system and make sure you have the kernel headers installed. It is a binary-only Xorg driver requiring a Linux kernel module for its use.
The proprietary “NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver” provides optimized hardware acceleration of OpenGL applications via a direct-rendering X server.
That means you MUST install proprietary NVIDIA driver. But like I said in my previous guides, it doesn’t give you 3D acceleration features or GPU acceleration based applications (such as CUDA and GPU pass through).
Open source drivers can be confirmed by using lsmod | grep nouveau command. By default Kali Linux installs open source NVIDIA driver nouveau which works great if you just want a display. This guide explains how to install proprietary “NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver” or NVIDIA driver on Kali Linux 1.1.0 kernel 3.18 system. Install NVIDIA driver on Kali Linux 1.1.0