Dual Screen gets very slow with NVidia

Question

When I enable a dual-screen with the NVidia X-Server Settings (TwinView) my laptop becomes very slow (you can't work anymore) after a short time. Strangely enough this occurred with Dell and Samsung monitors but it kept working fine with a LG monitor.

I searched google, but couldn't find any pointers yet (neither on askubuntu or bugs.launchpad.net), so I hope someone recognizes this or help me to report a good bugreport.

My graphics card info is

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G96M [Quadro FX 770M] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 30e7
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
    Memory at d2000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
    I/O ports at 7000 [size=128]
    Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: nvidia
    Kernel modules: nvidia-current, nouveau, nvidiafb

I pasted my full hardware info at http://paste.ubuntu.com/638376/ Just tell me if you need to know more.

Solution

I am encountering the exact same issue in 11.10 (Quadro NVS 290 on Dell monitors). I was able to make things a little bit more tolerable by using the driver version 173 instead of the recommended version.

This breaks nvidia-settings though, as it can't detect monitors correctly with the older driver. I installed the new driver, configured TwinView, then reverted to the old driver. The configuration kept working, and was a little speedier than compared to the defaults.

Comments

[Falk]

I updated my desktop at work. And I have a horrible fps. Every worked in 11.04 but after the update to 11.10 things goes really slow. Disabled lots of compiz features, but no cigarr. Tried a few different drivers but nope. I have the Quadro NVS 290 with two HP monitors. It looks now that I have to go back to 11.04, and I really like 11.10 on my other computers. Even my laptop is faster than this..