I communicated a while back with various developers working on graphics
drivers & distributions to the source for gaming/video testing and review.
The conclusion of it all. The 9500 series is the way to go. Between
stability, features, performance and price. I would not recommend it though
over a new system with Intel graphics. The low end nVidia is comparable to
the newer Intel graphics chipsets and in a number of areas better.
Here is the graphics card we are shipping:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/geforce-9500gt-1gb-pci-express-20-video-card-gnulinux
Note: 512MB is all you really need. For business reasons we are shipping the
1GB version (the price difference is minuscule to non-existent).
