nVidia drivers in Xorg / KDE – performance and stability for different cards-Collection of common programming errors

I have a GeForce 250 GTS card and I am using the proprietary drivers in Linux (KDE on Debian Testing). Unfortunately recently I had a lot of issues with stability and performance – I had quite a few system crashes and the performance is appalling. There are various workarounds, but they don’t always work and some of them help with one application, but make another one worse…

I was planning to upgrade my GPU anyway, hence the question – is the situation better on newer GPUs? Or should I move to a Radeon instead? I might have an opportunity to join a CUDA project in a couple of months, but it doesn’t really matter if I can’t use my desktop…

I need a reasonable graphics card for some gaming in Windows, but in Linux I am just using basic KDE and Gnome applications, Iceweasel (Firefox), Chrome, GIMP, etc. so nothing fancy really.

1. I had no problems with the proprietary drivers on my previous FX 8600GT nor on my recently acquired GT430. Sometimes there are small problems, but nothing serious for me. I do some gaming on Linux, plus a couple of games with Wine, I have a lot of effects in KDE enabled and I use 1920×1080 resolution on my desktop.

   As far as graphics performance goes on Linux I consider NVidia with their proprietary drivers buy far the best combination. I am also doing a little CUDA lately and it works great.

   Also there is no real hardware video decoding on any of the other alternatives. ATI/AMD has the capability on hardware, but there is still no reliable support in the drivers or in the video players. NVidia’s VDPAU became in the past couple of years a kind of unofficial standard in this field.