Apart from the Galaxy Nexus, the Nexus S is the only Android handset out there, which is running Ice Cream Sandwich, officially. While Ice Cream Sandwich on the Nexus S is smooth, it is still not as smooth or fast as on the Galaxy Nexus. This is kind of obvious since the Galaxy Nexus has a better hardware and oodles of RAM.

According to Nexus S users, the biggest performance boost they get under Ice Cream Sandwich is by overclocking their phone’s CPU. Now, one XDA member has found another way to improve the overall smoothness of Ice Cream Sandwich on the Nexus S.

XDA member obsanity recommends Nexus S users to simply download and install the Chainfire 3D application from the Market, and then install the CF3D driver. There is no proper technical explanation as to how the CF3D driver helps in increasing the smoothness of Nexus S on ICS, but the results are pretty solid.The CF3D driver acts as an intermediate OpenGL driver between the apps and the phone’s GPU to improve performance, which somehow improves the overall smoothness of the Nexus S under ICS.

I personally installed the CF3D driver on the Nexus S running an Android 4.0.3 based custom ROM, and the phone definitely felt snappier and smoother. Chainfire 3D requires users to have root access to their phone’s system partition. The app also allows users to run Tegra 2 exclusive games on non-Tegra 2 handsets.