Fast drop-in replacement for "ssh -X"

I'm looking for something to provide faster X11 fowarding than ssh -X provides. I do not need a full GUI session or the ability to drop/resume user sessions. I use NX regularly, but as far as I can tell, there's no way to use it without a virtual desktop where all the graphics get painted. (See: http://www.midwinter.com/~koreth/freenx-howto.html) VNC also seems to work only with a virtual desktop; same with X2Go. What I want is something I can run from a terminal that will only open a graphics window and draw to it when it needs to (like ssh -X does). Does this exist? Maybe I've just missed the proper way to do it in something like NX. I've done a ton of searching--I look into this every couple months without a solution--but maybe I'm just searching for the wrong thing. (Full use case: I'm running Sublime Text on a Linux desktop, and I connect to R running on a remote Linux server via SublimeREPL, which is more or less a terminal emulator within Sublime Text. Plotting things from R happens in a forwarded X window, and it's extremely slow using ssh -XC. I'd love to be able to send the terminal+graphics connection over NX, but NX doesn't seem to support single applications like this; it forces a full-blown user session with a virtual desktop.)