I asked about this several times in the "ask ati dev thread", but never got a reply. It would be great to get some feedback from the ATI developers.
I wonder when fglrx will support EXA or another proprietary accaleration architecture that is able to accalerate XRender well.
fglrx now uses XAA which falls back to software for almost anything more than solid fills and lines.
Almost all currently developed drivers support EXA, even the proprietary NVidia driver recently got quite powerful XRender accaleration in the latest beta release.
Its still buggy but once those problems are ironed out, fglrx is the only driver arround not capable of accalerating XRender composition. (well, the crappy recently open-sourced VIA drivers don't count I guess).
I definitely second this. If the proprietary driver exists to offer extra features, it ought to start with the basics. Decent XRender acceleration is an important feature, and may in fact be the most important feature to have at this point. Use EXA or do your own thing, but please get this in.
AFAIK, Textured2D and TexturedXRender accelerates 2D, but they both result in lots of corruption on my screen.. (Actually, 8.8 of FGLRX causes corruption on 2D without any options)