Yes. We have done some optimization for h/w acceleration RENDER implementation but not including all aspects of our h/w.
I have a practical example of a situation in which hardware accelerated RENDER is of great importance. I'm currently running the network of a newspaper that's in the process of moving back to the thin client model. We're using linux thin clients running on old hardware (~P133, 32MB RAM) backed by a dual Xeon server with 2GB of RAM.
My experience so far has shown that any old hardware will work wonderfully as a thin client, so long as the graphics chipset is fast and well supported. The P133s are very sluggish with the built-in S3 graphics chips, but if upgraded to a PCI NVidia GEForce 4 MX they feel like one is sitting at the server console. The graphics card appears to be the primary factor in the performance of these systems.
As such, I suspect that if your company had a quality, RENDER-accelerated driver included in XFree86, your hardware would be the _only_ choice for people wanting to deploy thin clients. Of course, that's not a huge market. On the other hand, anybody who wants good 2D performance is likely to prefer a card with good open-source drivers and H/W accelerated RENDER - even for a modern desktop.
Yes, 3D would be nice - but currently the market for linux desktops seems mostly office based, and there it's snappy and responsive 2D - plus a driver already integrated into the OS - that's likely to make the difference.
Of course, I only speak from my experience at a small-ish newspaper, I can't claim to see the whole picture.
Craig Ringer
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