Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

It might work but my impression is that it works slowly. Gaming is an important application
for me and the only reason I keep That Other OS around, for instance. At the moment I find it
impossible to find even a review that would compare some Intel chipset against the latest, or
even older crop of NV or ATI hardware.

I've historically always got bad experience with AMD/ATI hardware, although it must be said
that the laptop I am typing on is based on X1250, and it is the first time that 3D seems to
work. It did sure have trouble before with compiz: at some point using xserver-xgl did the
thing, then xorg update broke that for months, then it started working again, but the display
flickers a bit, especially with non-fullscreen video modes. Plus I can see a diagonal line on
the screen during screen updates, it must be rendering the screen as a texture with two giant
triangles. And it works quite slowly...

So my opinion for the two reasons above is that NVidia is still the king.

By the way, I think it is acceptable level of "tweaking" that one has to do something like
"apt-get install nvidia-glx" or "apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx". If I recall correctly,
that is pretty much all it takes today to have them work. (And Ubuntu naturally suggests
installing this stuff using that restricted driver thingy.)