Drastically reduced performance

[TheMohawkNinja]

I use Nitrogen as the means to set the wallpaper many times per second for a "fade" effect in my own project (https://github.com/TheMohawkNinja/WallFade). Since I last updated my Linux install roughly a month ago, the time it takes for nitrogen to set an image has been significantly lower (in the tenths of a second).

Assuming this has nothing to do with some underlying change to X, is it possible to bypass whatever changes had been performed recently that results in this performance drop?