"My NVIDIA chip never worked "out of the box" with Ubuntu. Until
I installed the restricted driver my desktop was unusable. I would
have half of my screen blanked out and if I auto-resized the screen
from my monitor's menu, it would size it up almost correctly but
either the top or bottom panel would be out of view. And the
graphical rendering was horrible. After a restricted install and
reboot, everthing was back to looking great.
"The ATI card did not have this problem. The default driver
included with Ubuntu provided me with a beautiful looking desktop.
The fonts were rendered correctly out-of-the-box and my screen
resolution was perfect. I know it's only been two days, but for the
life of me I can't remember if Compiz effects were working
initially or after I installed the ATI restricted driver from the
repositories."