In reference, I do use the nouveau driver on non-CUDA development systems.  I like how the development teams respond to bugs and fixes.  There are some differences in the behavior of the kernels between 4.6.x and 4.7.x with the video drivers.  I am not sure if is related to libdrm, mesa, of libGL types.  I have a 960 GTX which is in the same product family as the 970 GTX.  Had problems with the 4.7.0 kernel and reverted back to the 4.6.5 kernel and working with some limitations.