Is there a way to lower GPU load from Ice Cream Sandwich?
I'm not sure if it's part of a truly vanilla ICS build (though I think it may be), but the early CM9 and vanilla ICS builds I've played with all have a "Developer Options" entry in the main system settings. This contains several options which relate to overall graphics effects such as:


Window animation scale: can be set to "off" to disable window animations
Transition animation scale: can also be set to "off"
Force GPU rendering: apparently tries to force GPU rendering of 2D textures/effects. May improve performance according to some (this generally caused my EVO to overheat, though)


It also has an option named "Background process limit". Setting a lower number should help improve performance overall, in theory.