> Is there a more definitive way to tell if gnome-shell is or isn't offloading onto the GPU?
$ glxinfo | grep renderer
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.3, 128 bits)
"llvmpipe" is the software CPU (SSE2) renderer
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD REDWOOD
One of the hardware renderers.