Hi. Please give me the output of:
lspci -nn | grep 'VGA'
dpkg-query -l nvidia* | grep '^ii'
Blending should not be a problem, at all... What about blending was the problem? What was the problem? What you are describing sounds like it either didn't know it was online, or could not install the driver due to some other broken packages or something. At that splash screen, btw, you can just hit esc to see what is going on in the background.