Last night Nvidia released a new beta version of their binary driver. This one has some new features, where especially a couple of RENDER pathes are now hardware accelerated. I've installed the driver on my desktop machine on a rather clean OpenSuse 11 and a 7600GS and tweaked it to enable to new feature that aren't on by default in this release (but are planned to switch on for the real deal). The performance problems I've had with switching desktop and apps are totally gone and KDE4 is flying like I've never seen it before. Switching tabs in Firefox is still slow, Konqi does it swiftly. I've set the following options in my xorg.conf.

So assumably I'm getting only part of the performance improvements. I'm asked if anybody knows why, up until now to no avail.

Overall I'm very positive about this release.