I have a Intel Sandy Bridge i5 with the HD 3000 graphics card. I used to be able to play Urban Terror and Nexuiz comfortably with 85 and 60 frames per seconds until mid/end of October 2012, the former even on a full HD display with that many frames.

Now I have around 30 to 45 on the smaller laptop screen and around 20 to 30 on the external monitor. Did something happen to Kubuntu 12.04 so that it has less graphics performance than previously?

Update

I looked into the system monitor and could not detect anything being at the maximum. The four CPU cores were pretty much bored, the 8 GB RAM were filled with maybe 2 GB. And I ran intel_cpu_top and did not notice anything at its limit. See the output.

after Kernel bisecting

I now did a kernel bisect and tried 3.2.0-23, 3.2.0-27, 3.2.0-29 and 3.2.0-30 and all had full graphics power. Interestingly, I then had full power when I just booted back into the regular 3.2.0-32 kernel. This does not make sense to me …