It's been a long day, so I may miss some pertinent information, however I'll include everything I feel is relevant:
I installed google chrome today (just for the purposes of accessing a google docs file - I wanted to see if there was any improvement). Almost immediately afterwards (I'm not sure how long it was, I didn't notice straight away), there started to be some stuttering. What I mean by this was, no matter what I was doing, the screen would always freeze up for a few milliseconds every second or so. This made work, and especially gaming, incredibly frustrating. I tried many solutions - updating video drivers, uninstalling chrome & its accompanying codecs, manually changing refresh rates, I even changed from the default setup that came off the ISO to Kubuntu and then Unity. After all this, I finally solved it by uninstalling nvidia drivers altogether, then reinstalling the base Neuveau driver. Things are now fine for work and browsing, but video games are a no go for me. I'd consider reinstalling the drivers, but that seems to be a similar process to what I did before when I uninstalled the drivers then reinstalled in order to ensure they were up to date, and I don't want to revert it to the old state - at least now I can browse the internet safely!
EDIT: I have a GTX 970 graphics card, and tried a variety of drivers, I recall nvidia-415 being the last one I tried, that's it though.
