Comment 4 for bug 987304

Foremost, apologies if this is not the right thread to post my observations or if they have been previously mentioned. I have an nvidia board and use the proprietary drivers. Like in oneiric, 3D applications (e.g., glxspheres) do run well after a reboot however, after using a couple of compiz animations (wall, scale) performance drops considerably. Furthermore, 2D performance also drops in applications like Thunderbird, where scrolling in a long list of email headers is very choppy and results in high CPU usage.

Recently, I discovered that just changing the screen refresh rate from nvidia-settings, back and forth between 50Hz and 60Hz, is enough to restore performance (including 2D). I noticed it because my screen's refresh rate is 60Hz however, by default, nvidia-settings reports it as 50Hz and refuses to remember my setting. I also manually set the refresh rate in CCSM at 60Hz. Hope this helps!