I have a Geforce GTX 550 TI (1GB) and I had no problems with it OR any drivers in 12.04 or earlier. Seems like it all went downhill since 12.10.

Sometimes the fonts on pages looks smeared into a Klingon-Asian dialect, the icons (like the "in progress" icon) in the software center is smudged half the time as well. That's with the default open source driver, I've tried the experimental, current proprietary, and tested proprietary driver... those were disasters.
The only thing working on my desktop was the freaking wallpaper. I also downloaded and manually installed the drivers from the Nvidia website and got the same problem.

I tried both x86 and x64 versions of Ubuntu and still got these same bugs. I need more than a wallpaper and I can't read smudged Klingon so can anyone tell me what gives?

I may go back to 12.04...