@Harry
The high cpu-load affect both ATI and NVidia but not Intel graphics as far I've seen . Myself I have a Radeon 9800 Pro running the open driver that is heavily affected by this high load.
The libcairo2 1.9 branch might affect nvidia further but the 1.8 branch causes the same problem i Lucid, however not that obvious for e.g. update manager since the progress bar there is held in a popup windows and thus much smaller.
@Harry
The high cpu-load affect both ATI and NVidia but not Intel graphics as far I've seen . Myself I have a Radeon 9800 Pro running the open driver that is heavily affected by this high load.
The libcairo2 1.9 branch might affect nvidia further but the 1.8 branch causes the same problem i Lucid, however not that obvious for e.g. update manager since the progress bar there is held in a popup windows and thus much smaller.
The fix to me is to use another theme.