Proprietary. VDPAU is the main reason I went with an NVidia card in the first place.

NVIDIA drivers all the way.

Once the nouveau drivers became included most distributions would install and than I would just get a black screen upon reboot. Took me sometime to figure that one out. Slackware defaulting to init 3 was especially handy for this. My nvidia cards are a bit dated though: onboard Geforce 6150 LE and Geforce 7800 GT. The newer hardware probably has better out of the box support.

I also use the proprietary driver. I play several games quite often (redeclipse, sauerbraten, assaultcube, alienarena, etc) and also play around with 3D modelling in blender.

Nouveau just doesn't cut it for 3D programs.
It does load most games fine (visually), but it won't achieve anything higher than 2 frames per second.

I try to keep my computer so it mostly uses open-source software only, but nvidia driver is always an exception for me. And i have nothing to complain about the state of nvidia's proprietary driver, in fact i would say it is the most performing (and stable) driver available for graphics on linux.

No, nouveau will have worse support with newer cards. nVidia provides no developers, no code, not even technical papers to help the nouveau project. Its all done from reverse engineering.

*edit- the 6150 (and other 'cut down' onboard nVidia video as well) can have more problems than the normal desktop GPUs, even with windows.

Same here, but it is not for the same noble reason. It is only for a practical reason.

I used to install the drivers via the SBo slackbuild but I had probelms with latest release as it crashes when I log out of KDE (or whichever DE/WM) I use. My laptop is now very old (from 2007). Surprisingly I found that nouveau is more stable and I get to use the available KDE/XFCE display tools for dual monitors, which in my opinion are better than those provided by nvidia.

My reason is only 50% noble, the other 50% is the extreme annoyance of random hangs that recent nvidia drivers cause. I just couldn't take it anymore. It crashed while I was working on my research paper ... luckily it auto-saves.

So has those who are complaining that nouveau has bad performance tried upgrading it by using the scripts in /source/x/x11 ?

I also recommend upgrading mesa as well.

I use nouveau. It works. It comes with Slackware. Good enough for me.

FOSS drivers based on reverse engineering are okay, if you own very old hardware: The Geforce 9800 GT is a G92 (8800 GT) - a design which debuted five years ago in 2007. And the Geforce 7600 GT is so old, that you can replace it with a recent Intel GPU (excellent vendor-supported FOSS drivers) and get better performance with way lower heat dissipation/noise.

The second problem is: Most cards from this era died already due to solder problems. And there we have the next problem with mature FOSS drivers: If your hardware gets TOO old, nobody maintains the driver anymore (for lack of hardware) and voila - your device gets unsupported again.

Vendor-supported drivers (FOSS or not) are the way to go. And the vendor support by nVidia is excellent. Reverse engineering is just too slow for a useable device lifecycle. I replaced my 2005 AGP Geforce 6800 in 2008 with a 9600 GT PCIe (reason: AGP is gone). The latter is now "supported" by nouveau, but it got already replaced again by a GTX 560 in 2011. So it is the nVidia BLOB for me, because it works rock stable since day one and doesn't let your graphics card sound like a jet engine.

There is a PCI Intel card? May be I am just retarded, but I couldn't find it when browsing the stores.

I disagree with all of that.

I don't think that Intel graphics and performance should be mentioned in the same sentence. My "very old" 8800 GTX could beat any Intel graphics in existence even with the nouveau drivers in both performance and stability. Intel graphics are completely worthless, and I think they may just stay that way for a very long time. I have never seen any Intel graphics in stores at all, except for integrated into mobos.

I have many very old nvidia cards that are working just fine, no the solder didn't fail. For example I have a Geforce 4000 series that works fine even today. In fact, I have an even older nvidia card, but I haven't seen the machine in a while, but I'll check it when I get to see it, and it'll probably still be working.

Although I must say that the performance that was provided by the nvidia blob was the best on Linux, and I seriously doubt anyone can prove me wrong on this, I must say that the stability of these drivers is not good. Even in the past I have had stability issues with certain version. With the newest version I get random crashes. Definitely not what I would call "rock stable". I would say the stability of these drivers is "capricious" at best.

By 'replace it with a recent Intel GPU' you mean trash the current motherboard/CPU setup (and probably RAM as well). You'd need a Intel HD 3000 to beat out a 7600GT by much, though the nVidia card is years old. Even a HD 3000 isnt going to be a huge amount faster than a 7600GT in most cases. A HD 5450/6450 or GT520 would get you into the ballpark of the intel HD video chips, and be pretty low power draw and heat output as well....without needing to replace anything apart from the video card.

Most of teh HD 5450/6450s are passive cooled, and passive cooled GT520s are easy to find as well. Its hard to beat totally passive for noise.

Intel hasnt made a standalone video card since the late 1990s.

Some? Yes. Most? No.

Give one example where FOSS drivers have dropped support for a GPU/video adapter.

9600GT has been supported by nouveau for years.

nVidia support for linux is far more limited than ATI/AMD, or even intel. AMD has released technical papaers, etc. to help the FOSS developers and even have paid developers on staff working on the FOSS drivers (and the closed source drivers). nVidia only releases closed drivers now, they dont rlease technical papaers, and have even dropped the open but obfuscated .nv drivers.

Hi,

I use NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-275.43.run on a nVidia Corporation G80 [GeForce 8800 GTS] (rev a2). Latest NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.20.run have a bug on my hardware, KDE menu and windows are kinda of transparent after a login/logout, described here.

regards.

295.33 was released on 22 March 2012, and has a few bug fixes.
From their web site:

Always gaming with my rig so it has higher end sli nvidia cards in it. The nouveau driver and x has not worked with these cards for more than a year or two now. The nvidia driver has always been excellent and I am happy with their support. I download the driver with Lynx and install before ever entering x on any new slackware install now.