Every benchmark did at least a little better, and 3dmark2001 did a lot better, today: http://kegel.com/wine/yagmarkdata/E8400-GT_220-Ubuntu_10.04_LTS-e8400-wine-1...
Why? Well, there are oodles of processes running in Gnome by default, plus the workrave app I use for my RSI. I had killed some of them on the benchmark machine earlier, but forgot to kill them again after rebooting; just noticed that last night. Today's results are with three more processes killed: workrave, gnome-screensaver, and bluetooth-applet. That might help explain the results a bit.
I did 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop' just now, rebooted, edited ~/.pulse/client.conf to disable pulseaudio autospawn, and killed pulseaudio xscreensaver update-notifier /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py /usr/lib/gvfs//gvfs-fuse-daemon bluetooth-applet There are now 'only' 148 or so processes in my idle system, only 29 of which are the interactive user; it seems fairly stripped down. I also ran nvidia-settings again to pick 'maximum performance' rather than adaptive, and told xfce to never blank the monitor. Let's see if all that makes a difference. (I need to make a big checklist of Things To Do After Rebooting.) - Dan