nvidia-drivers-180.08. GTX260 896MB. AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+, 8GB Corsair XMS2.

I must say this beta driver did a nice job getting plasma to run under kde4. However, the funny thing is that I noticed my glxgears framerate dropped from 6000 to 4800 with these new drivers, and "smooth scrolling" in firefox is still very very choppy. I doubt my system's underpowered here...anyone have any ideas on what's going on? Thanks.

Of course your system is underpowered. ;-)

Scrolling web pages and other "heavy-duty" 2D operations like moving windows and rendering text is a use case that obviously major card vendors didn't consider when designing their GPUs. Probably, because benchmarks have been focusing on 3D performance in the last years and no one ever measured how a card performs in 2D until the bad performance became so obvious that it even became noticable during normal desktop work.

What used to possible without ANY problems even 10 years ago, now is a major problem. My old K6-2 450 PC never had any scrolling issues and could render text probably faster than a system of today.

Nowadays, not only Nvidia is affected, however, the situation is particularly bad with them. I returned one GeForce 7300 GT due to its miserable 2D performance. I switched to an ATI where the situation is bearable yet far from perfect. I am talking about Windows here, where the change of the driver model in Vista probably caused some issues.

The bad situation in Windows is reflected and in Linux, and this is a strong indication that there are serious problems in the hardware itself or in the (unified) drivers that cause the bad 2D performance.