14 DAY TRIAL // Mutter, the window and compositing manager that displays and manages your desktop via OpenGl, has just received a commit that should make the software rendering work a lot better for GNOME Shell.
It's not like people have been complaining that the software rendering is too slow. This is because most people have hardware capable of running a 3D environment.
If, by any chance, you don't have such hardware, the rendering will be done by the processor and not by your GPU. A new commit summited for Mutter should make GNOME Shell 3.10.1 work a lot better under these circumstances.
The commit itself sounds rather innocuous: “Use nearest-pixel interpolation if the texture is unscaled. This improves performance, especially with software rendering.”
This change for Mutter should land in the next stable version.