GNOME Shell suboptimal performance

[Newfie]

First off, Unity 3d, 2d, and GNOME Fallback work fine. This is mostly related to GNOME Shell (3.4.0). I've reported similiar issues in the past, but they seem to have been related to something other than Shell and were eventually resolved.

Issues:

1- Window dragging is slightly laggy. I can see the window "catching up" with my cursor.
2- Scrolling in Web (epiphany-browser) is very jittery
3- Flash playback is slower than expected (YouTube)
4- The overview (Activities Menu) isn't smooth. It looks like a very fast slideshow when invoking it, and then when scrolling through applications it's very choppy.
5- Overall just doesn't feel fluid- almost like there's a delay in everything.

This PC is not a slow or outdated setup; it can run Unity and other desktops with absolute ease. I have a much older laptop which runs GNOME Shell without any hitch of lag, and it has a very low-end integrated NVIDIA GPU from 6 years ago.

GNOME Shell should be flawless on this PC. It has 8 GB of RAM and a 6 core Phenom II CPU. The only very low end part is a Radeon 6450 GPU. I suspect that the open source driver might be part of the issue here, but it works just fine with Unity 3d (and like mentioned above, a very old NVIDIA card running on Nouveau works perfectly).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: gnome-shell 3.4.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-20.33-generic 3.2.12
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-20-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.95-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.312
Date: Wed Mar 28 15:53:34 2012
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Beta amd64 (20120328)
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) reached end-of-life on April 28, 2017.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-shell (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]