No, you don't need to get an Nvidia card. ATI was working well enough for me, even though I sometimes found it "a bit" challenging to get it running; what really drove me to the nvidia camp was the absence of any ATI drivers for Solaris and FreeBSD.
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...allation_Guide
This is the last one I used before I made the jump to nvidia and it worked really well (I recommend the "manual way"). Take it slowly, don't skip a single thing.