That’s the Nvidia drivers. Dkms just builds to match your kernel when the kernel updates. Intel and AMD contribute driver code so you don’t have to do anything extra but Nvidia doesn’t do that because they are shits.
As far as not needing it for x11 you are either using nouveau, the reverse engineered drivers which last I tried are effectively useless for any modern workload, or a non dkms version of Nvidia driver provided by distro maintainers or someone else and just didn’t notice.