Compiz Redrawing Problem under Ubuntu 8.10

Ever since I moved to Intrepid Ibex, I’ve been having problems with screen redrawing.  It was a little bit of a pain to isolate the culprit, but I was pretty sure that it was Compiz-Fusion.  In xterm, emacs, and a few other applications I would have sections of the window or buffer that would be blank until I had clicked or pressed a key.  It went from being a mild annoyance to a real pain in the neck (ie, major blocks of code would vanish in emacs or I wouldn’t be able to read sections of my inbox in mutt).  After a lot of searching, I think I’ve found the bug that I’ve been experiencing.

Apparently, the problem is related to something to the Nvidia “powermizer”, which by default forces the video card into a lower performance mode.  I don’t really care all that much about my framerates.  What I am concerned about is being able to see the text in my windows.  It would appear that the problem has been discussed quite a bit on the forums and the following changes appear to have fixed the problem.  It would also appear that the developers are working on a beta driver that addresses the problem.  Until then, the following seems to have taken care of the problem, which makes me immensely happy.

sudo cat > /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia << "EOF"
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222"
options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=1
EOF

Thanks to pauljohn32 on the Ubuntu bug listing for his solution.