I can second that one which improved things on my laptop. Sad as it may
be the binary drivers seem to deliver better general system performance
than the nouveau ones.
Another one I experienced (again working with intensive Pd stuff) was to
ensure that all "CPU scaling" stuff was set to maximum performance and
nothing automatic is going on (such as "Ondemand" et sim.) both CPU-wise
*and* graphics card GPU-wise (this can e.g. be controlled in the
nvidia-panel for the proprietary drivers).
All this, of course, after taking care of the 'usual' real-time
settings. This not only on the jack/audio side: e.g. even if jack is
running realtime with bleeding edge low latency your software may not be
playing well rt (I experienced this with Pure Data were an explicit -rt
command line switch is needed to get smooth rt performance).