I have a PC with on-board ATI HD-6530D. The motherboard is less than a year old, but apparently this is far too old for AMD/ATI to still support the chipset so proprietary drivers don't exist for it. I'm using the FOSS drivers (which would be my preference anyway) but I'm having issues in X that are causing it to die one way or another every day or so. The research I've done so far suggests that I have two options: give up half my life to working out what's going on, or accept it and move on.

With the latter option in mind, that means I want to buy a cheap PCI-X video card, but I'd like to get one that's at least as "good" as the HD6530D. And for reasons of lack of support I'd like to avoid AMD/ATI. That pretty much means nVidia (unless someone tells me they're just as bad?).

Any recommendations? No gaming, so just responsive desktop graphics, and reliable under Linux. (I'm on Kubuntu 13.04 (beta) at the moment, which I upgraded to in part to see if it improved things, which it didn't.)

Aside: I did manage to install the ATI drivers and it did seem better, albeit with an "unsupported hardware" logo permanently on my screen, which it may be possible to get rid of. But I didn't stick with it long enough to see if it really made things better. If nVidia/ATI are as bad as each other then I'd consider either brand's card that's currently supported if it's cheap enough, especially if it's reliable under the FOSS drivers. I was sure that AMD made some moves to open sourcing their drivers, but I must have dreamed it?