SDL2 hardware accelerated renderer crashes linux when using Proprietary drivers on xubuntu 12.04?

I am creating a small 2D game library (That's right world, another one!) in C++ using SDL and I finally got around to testing its current state (very much a work in progress) on linux(xubuntu 12.04). Up until now I have mostly been working on my Windows 10 install. Note: My linux and windows 10 installs are on the same machine. At first I was using the xorg nvidia driver, my code was using hardware accelerated rendering (i.e. using the SDL_RENDERER_ACCELERATED flag when creating the SDL_Renderer) but when I ran my code I was getting poor frame rate ~100FPS, bear in mind that at this point I am only testing it by drawing one little animation on screen and on windows I was getting ~1200FPS. I had the idea that it may be because of the graphics driver. So I switched to the recommended nvidia proprietary driver for my GPU, restarted, recompiled, and ran my game again. Then an empty window appeared, my computer froze but the FPS counter in the window title reported ~15000 FPS (woohoo!). I sighed, began bashing on my keyboard, ctrl-alt-del logged me out, and I logged back into the same frozen screen as before. After a hard-restart I examined my test program's log and it reported that it successfully entered the game loop i.e. began rendering frames. Now, if I add a delay in the main loop or use vsync everything is fine (and faster when using the proprietary nvidia driver), no crashes. Everything as defined. I am confused as to what is happening, I know that my program is trying to go as fast as it can if I don't have a sleep in there but I wouldn't have thought the scheduler would give it so much processor time as to neglect the rest of the system. I tried looking into the differences between the Windows and linux schedulers but I can find a solid reason as to why my program would runaway on linux. You can view the library code here: https://github.com/callumW/Howler the library is in Howler/ and the test program is in testsrc/ the main loop being in Game.cpp: run(). (As a side note, if you have any suggestions to the library code I would be glad to receive them). Does anyone have any ideas as to what is happening? It is evident that I need to cap the frame rate, and seeing as I'm not short of FPS that is not an issue. I also assume this is good practice as to not use power unnecessarily. But this peaked my interest and I wondered if anyone had an answer for me.