If you are experiencing poor graphics performance on your Ubuntu box – such as jerky scrolling in Firefox and sluggish 2D animations in applications such as cairo-dock and the ‘docky’ gnome-do, you may want to consider upgrading your nvidia drivers from nvidia-glx-177 or nvidia-glx-173 to the newer nvidia-glx-180 driver. Whilst this driver is not yet recommended by Ubuntu (and hence is not visible in Hardware Manager) it may well fix quite a lot of bugs you are experiencing and improve overall performance.
To install the drivers, simply fire up a terminal and enter the following command:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180 nvidia-180-modaliases
Once that is complete, reboot the computer and open up nvidia-settings in a terminal, it should now tell you that you are running the 180.* nvidia driver. Likewise, Hardware Manager should also tell you the same thing. If you experience any problems with the new driver, you should probably downgrade back to 177 or 173 until Ubuntu releases Jaunty Jackalope – but I haven’t run into any difficulties yet!
