It's a little late, but try Manjaro XFCE edition. Lightweight with the latest Nvidia drivers pre-installed.

I'm a bit rusty with nvidia drivers and i presume you are trying to install propitiatory drivers. What card are you using because i did have a friend who had to jump quite a few hoops to get his laptop to play ball.

Shamelessly gonna add in my own issues with AMD. I recently bought a 7950 and these cards can really go on windows which is why its a bit of a shock that i still find many source games having only just enough power to play at 40fps. I have heard however that GNOME 3 is a bit slow for gaming, something about composing?

Gnome 3 should not affect the game performance of any game running full screen as Mutter will suspend the composting on any full screen program by default.

As to your problems with the latest AMD chips, is this with Catalyst or radeonsi? If it is Catalyst I really do not understand the problem; radeonsi is slower than the other free radeon drivers as it is still under more active development (the new DPM code in Linux 3.11 is supposed to help a lot in terms of performance with it) and of course will still be slower than Catalyst (for the time being, amazing things have been happening). If it is Catalyst you are already supposed to have near performance parity with Windows.

Just for comparison purpose, I use Xubuntu 12.04 with a AMD 6670 and have no issues at all with anything. Driver install was simple with Jockey. I also installed my brothers GF240 on his Xubuntu box with Jockey, again it was a breeze and I have yet to hear him complain about anything. The guy doesn't know anything about computers but doesn't seem to have any issue with my switching him to Linux. My hat's off to him, this guy dumped his Xbox to play games on Linux. Guess he didn't like the idea of the NSA peeking in on him heh.

The AMD 6000 series is the sweet spot for Radeon cards, the 7000 series has some issues. It really depends on other components in your system also. I build all my computers with select parts that work together well and play nice with Linux. And to top it all off, I've only been using Linux (Permanently) for around 8 months.

Or maybe I'm just lucky, back around '98 I managed to Install a Redhat distro and I was more than new to that sort of thing. My 'winmodem' didn't function, so I spent some time reading forums and edited a few config files to get it working. In any case, in Xubuntu installing a driver is as simple as clicking the menu, going to settings and clicking Additional Drivers. Click one of the divers and then Activate and reboot. I really don't see how that's difficult, am I missing something?. I've yet to have an issue and I'm on my 6th installation on my computers here with all different hardware configs.

Also, It's generally a good idea to have a newer Kernel if you have newer hardware. So you can get the latest modules. There are also slight performance decreases if you are coming from Windows, but it shouldn't be so bad that you can't play anything. And the drivers are always getting better. Remember, we are at the tip of the Iceberg for Linux Gaming. I'm here to stay until the end, I can't see myself going back to Windows after knowing about the backdoors and NSA links, that would be lunacy.

Of course, if you are using the built-in driver, I can see why you would be having performance issues. Installing the proprietary driver will yield much better performance, like Hamish wrote. At this point I'm rambling so I'll end here.

I wish I had not choose a laptop with nvidia graphics. Now they have that thing called optimus that aparently is only supported in windows. It is a pain to run games using the nvidia discrete card.
Btw thanks to neopirate for mentioning Manjaro, I didnt know about that distribution and I love it!
Also I love XFCE, it is so minimalist, I hate the current desktop enviroment wars in the open source world.

Quoting: DaifukuI wish I had not choose a laptop with nvidia graphics. Now they have that thing called optimus that aparently is only supported in windows. It is a pain to run games using the nvidia discrete card.
Btw thanks to neopirate for mentioning Manjaro, I didnt know about that distribution and I love it!
Also I love XFCE, it is so minimalist, I hate the current desktop enviroment wars in the open source world.

Manjaro is great with optimus!