Comment 3 for bug 617363

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and help to improve Ubuntu.

plymouth can only use the framebuffer device that the kernel makes available to it. Since in your case this is shown to be "ProcFB: 0 VESA VGA", the graphics will be rendered accordingly.

There is some work in progress for Ubuntu 10.10 to let plymouth pick up a framebuffer directly from the bootloader, and the behavior change you're seeing may be fallout from this. Reassigning to the grub2 package as a result, the issue will lie either there or with the kernel