Comment 13 for bug 1293384

Thomas, one thing you can do to disable some of the unity effects when not running on sw-renderer, is to run unity with:
  COMPIZ_CONFIG_PROFILE=ubuntu UNITY_LOW_GFX_MODE=1 compiz --replace

Other optimizations we could do in that case are:
 1) Disabling the compiz live-resize (it shouldn't affect movement btw)
 2) Reduce the decorations shadows radius

You can actually try to see if these aspects might affect you without any code changes, but just hacking on compiz settings with:
 a) install compizconfig-settings-manager
 b) run ccsm and change these settings:
      To verify (1): resize plugin → General → Resize mode: Rectangle
      To verify (2): unity plugin → Decorations → Override Theme Settings: checked (then hack on config)