That being said if youre looking for performance, the last thing you’d want is open source nvidia drivers; theyre built entirely off reverse engineering, which takes time.

Pretty sure that is not true anymore since a couple of years. Only newer cards can capitalise the gains from the ‘official’ open drivers though.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/

Depends on what you want to play. If you want to play current games with current hardware then current kernel and drivers help a lot. A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.