Comment 15 for bug 85449

For other people coming to this bug - this bug is probably tied to Martin's particular hardware. If you have a Geforce 5xxx or later then this bug almost certainly does not apply to you (because you have the option to use later drivers which NVIDIA actively release new versions of).

Martin:
Unfortunately the open source nv driver has never supported 3D (even on Edgy and previous versions of Ubuntu). There is a reverse engineering effort called nouveau (http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ ) to try and create open source drivers but who knows if they will ever succeed or have the speed of the closed ones. Without hardware specs it's going to be a tough process.

I suspect no Ubuntu developer responded to your bug because there is nothing that they can readily do about it. The amount of effort required to start investigating closed source driver issues is very high and the chance of resolving the issue in a successful fashion (or even establishing that the hardware if faulty) is very low for people without the source. You might find it helpful to read this: http://<email address hidden>/msg00657.html which talks about Ubuntu's binary driver policy.

To be honest, it looks like you did exactly the right thing and have pinned it down to a binary driver bug, filed it here and then contacted NVIDIA. Alas these problems occur and due to its binary nature only NVIDIA can help you quickly track down whether it's a hardware bug (that only manifests itself with the new drivers) or a driver issue. There is a VERY strong chance that this problem only shows up with your exact model of card (and possibly motherboard). As a last ditch effort you may want to try emailing nvidia-bugs (see http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-9755/README/chapter-06.html ) with a very carefully crafted report (it is pivotal that it contains the report log and clear, highly reproducible steps that manifest the problem).

I'm not surprised that NVIDIA don't support all the different versions of their driver though - it would be a costly Q&A nightmare and for very little money in return. NVIDIA probably don't make money from supporting non-recent cards and their biggest and most profitable Linux customers probably don't use "old" card either...