I have been using Linux Mint for about 6 or 7 months now as my daily driver, but I have been playing with Linux for a few years. Linux Mint seems to be very good with the Nvidia drivers, I added the xorg-edgers ppa and I can easily switch between a bunch of different driver versions. I am using the most recent version of Linux Mint, 17.2 or something, with cinnamon as my DE.
I believe it was this past Sunday, July 12th that I started to experience frame dropping/stuttering. It doesn't happen in any one particular application, but on the entire desktop. It occurs in games, movies, and just dragging windows around on a blank desktop so it looks like it is the desktop's problem, like cinnamon is dropping frames. I initially thought it started because I had messed something up in the nvidia settings as I was playing around with these at the time. When I drag a window around in a smooth motion, about every second it looks either like the window just stops moving for a frame or two, or maybe even jumps back a few frames. Sometimes it happens at a higher frequency, like maybe 500ms, sometimes it happens at around 2 second intervals, but it occurs at a constant frequency once it starts. Sometimes the stutter or jump isn't as big as others, and I'm not sure if the jumps or stutters get bigger over time. A reboot stops the stuttering for a time, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour after rebooting the stuttering starts happening again.
This initially started on the nvidia proprietary driver version 349.16, so i upgraded to the 352.21 available from xorg-edgers and selectable in the cinnamon/mint Driver Manager. This update did not fix anything. So I changed it to 346.72 which I used a few months ago and this problem did not happen back then. The problem still occurred with 346. So I changed it to the nouveau driver (in the Driver Manager, you can just select a driver version, I have 6 proprietary versions and the nouveau one to select, and then it applies the changes, reboot and you are on a different driver) and on the nouveau driver this problem did not occur. I then switched back to 349 to see if that switch somehow cleared something, and the problem still persisted.
So I thought I screwed something up, so I decided to revert back to an image I took of the drive back at the start of May, I use Clonezilla to image my drives for backups. I reverted the image and everything seemed fine, so I started to apply the updates that have come through the past few months. Then I started getting the same stuttering issue, on the 349 driver that I was on 3 months ago. I did not have this problem three months ago, so I believe this problem may be because of the recent updates to the cinnamon desktop, as I applied all the updates to my image from a few months ago and started getting this problem.
My solution would appear to be to use nouveau until some updates come through (or revert again and try to determine which update starts the stuttering), but I was wondering if anyone else running Linux Mint with Cinnamon and the Nvidia proprietary driver has experienced this issue.