The Cost Of Running Compiz
For the remainder of these tests we just have the results from the proprietary ATI Catalyst and NVIDIA drivers since the open-source Mesa drivers are simply not able to handle the newer and more demanding OpenGL software.
Starting with the Unigine tests, again there was no performance hit exhibited by the Catalyst driver. Meanwhile the NVIDIA driver was about 10% faster when Compiz was not running.
While the Catalyst performance was maintained, NVIDIA's Compiz performance gap widened with the newer and more intense Unigine Tropics test.