I run Arch on a GTX 285 and never had graphics driver issues. All I ever had to do was tweak on coolbits in the xorg.conf to enable fan control and overclocking

I run Arch on a GTX 285 and never had graphics driver issues. All I ever had to do was tweak on coolbits in the xorg.conf to enable fan control and overclocking (which you have to do manually on Windows as well). The lack of any support of Nouveau makes me not want to buy an Nvidia product in the future, but Catalyst really is the elephant in the room - if only AMD would ditch it, make radeon work really well and embrace the kernel people to make it as good as the Intel driver, they would be in a really good spot. But the drivers are there. If you are running any modern distro worth its salt, your graphics will work out of the box with the FOSS driver, and switching to the proprietary one is little more than a package get. Which is even easier than on Windows where you have to manually get the graphics driver if Windows doesn't recognize the card (sometimes it does).