Im sorry it didn't work for you.
AMD and nvidia both produce the excellent cards with drivers that are equally strong. The new radeons and their respective drivers with 'excellent'
linux support are a testament to their commitment and users. Nvidia just recently has begun to take on AMD with their 28nm kepler GPU's. Nvidia
drivers are pretty strong but are a still a bit buggy. On the higher end AMD crossfire works similarly as it does on windows.
AMD's absolute lack of FreeBSD support makes up for excellent linux support.
Nvidia is not as good for gaming as AMD (...IMO)and are better suited for floating point stuff or computational tasks that require something extra other than
just burning a CPU---like using linux, running SETI/Folding @home(and dedicated programs that require CUDA/PhysX), the usual FreeBSD stuff etc.
My use of Nvidia cards warrants enough to project the excellence of AMD. You really do require a $300 Nvidia card that actually does
perform as much.
Whenever you might get more time after your school starts you could try it on a sane installation of ultimate edition. Without tampering or
playing around it might just work. The moment you start playing around with applications and different configurations you will experience the
the havoc being created by the free open source drivers.The compiz that works with gallium3d is in a pretentious state.
On a practical note if everything is working fine and you dont use HDMI then dont use amd drivers, better you focus at pressing problems at hand and leave it be.