dromieu The honest, albeit short answer is any graphics card older than 1 year old but less than 5 years old tend to work almost flawlessly on linux. Although my desktop runs solus without issue on a GTX 660 so thats not to say older cards dont work, they just tend to be more hit and miss in my experience.
The problem with graphics cards on Linux is you are really at the mercy of the maintainers of a few key upstream packages. In your case the xorg maintainers no longer offer support for nvidia drivers for cards older than the 8800 series. Which to be honest is far older than I would have expected to begin with since the 8800 series is almost 14 years old