NVIDIA's 256.25 Beta Linux Driver Slows Things Down?

When starting with the Nexuiz game and running it at 1680 x 1050, which is the native resolution for this ZaReason notebook, there were no significant performance changes to note.

While OpenArena is CPU limited and is not taxing at all on the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M graphics processor, it experienced a major drop in performance when running the NVIDIA 256.25 Linux display driver. The frame-rate dropped from 164 to 103 FPS.

With Enemy Territory: Quake Wars the frame-rate had dropped from 29 to 24 FPS with the newest driver series that is currently in beta.