For those that don't know the specifics, the driver version is the recently-released 256.53. This was released in a rush after the previous version turned out to be a huge performance slug in certain situations.
However, there are still lots and lots of people (myself included) having problems with 256.53. This may be related to the kernel (as everybody involved seems to be on 2.6.35) but either way, the fix has to come from Nvidia.
And even if they do managed to get a new version out before Maverick releases, it needs testing and pulling into Ubuntu. Do not trust to hope.
I personally suggest you report your issue, along with a bug log (read the stickies) on the nvidia linux forum. In my experience, you'll get a lot more feedback there than you will through the standard support mechanism.
If performance is really woeful and you can extract some specific test-cases which exhibit this terrible performance then it can be possible to fix or work-around the slowness.
For example, earlier in the cycle there was a huge performance regression in Cairo which resulted in gradient drawing becoming incredibly slow. That was discovered to be due to Cairo turning on support for server-side gradients, which the drivers didn't support properly. And so Cairo was patched to avoid the slowness.
In that case the problem was narrowed down by a small test-case: rendering a GTK progress bar, which had a gradient on it.
If you can come up with a small, simple test-case, there's hope - you can file a Launchpad bug. If not, head to the nVidia forums as others have suggested.
Proprietary drivers can only be improved or updated by the owner (Nvidia). Installing the nvidia driver will enable your 3D acceleration and allow Ubuntu to run Unity. To install the latest driver via terminal check this webpage out for an easy guide. Ubuntu Proprietary Drivers
It is the proprietary driver so there is not much Canonical or the community can do about it.
The only chance that it will be improved is if it is the kernel interface to the driver that is causing the performance penalty but I have no knowledge about that sort of thing.
For those that don't know the specifics, the driver version is the recently-released
256.53. This was released in a rush after the previous version turned out to be a huge performance slug in certain situations.However, there are still lots and lots of people (myself included) having problems with
256.53. This may be related to the kernel (as everybody involved seems to be on2.6.35) but either way, the fix has to come from Nvidia.And even if they do managed to get a new version out before Maverick releases, it needs testing and pulling into Ubuntu. Do not trust to hope.
I personally suggest you report your issue, along with a bug log (read the stickies) on the nvidia linux forum. In my experience, you'll get a lot more feedback there than you will through the standard support mechanism.
If performance is really woeful and you can extract some specific test-cases which exhibit this terrible performance then it can be possible to fix or work-around the slowness.
For example, earlier in the cycle there was a huge performance regression in Cairo which resulted in gradient drawing becoming incredibly slow. That was discovered to be due to Cairo turning on support for server-side gradients, which the drivers didn't support properly. And so Cairo was patched to avoid the slowness.
In that case the problem was narrowed down by a small test-case: rendering a GTK progress bar, which had a gradient on it.
If you can come up with a small, simple test-case, there's hope - you can file a Launchpad bug. If not, head to the nVidia forums as others have suggested.
Proprietary drivers can only be improved or updated by the owner (Nvidia). Installing the nvidia driver will enable your 3D acceleration and allow Ubuntu to run Unity. To install the latest driver via terminal check this webpage out for an easy guide. Ubuntu Proprietary Drivers
Most likely not.
It is the proprietary driver so there is not much Canonical or the community can do about it.
The only chance that it will be improved is if it is the kernel interface to the driver that is causing the performance penalty but I have no knowledge about that sort of thing.
Try going to NVIDIA support.