The free drivers work in the sense that you get a working desktop. But by no means can you get good performance on something that puts something other than ligh

The free drivers work in the sense that you get a working desktop. But by no means can you get good performance on something that puts something other than light burden to your card. Nvidia gives no clues as to how to implement clock boost over the minimum base frequency in driver, so the free driver only uses the minimum available computing power, enough to get the desktop running.