2009/5/6 Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr:
I have a feeling that Wine is the only 'application' that really tests the Unix OpenGL drivers, by virtue of being the only application to run the really complex vertex and pixel shaders that are found only in Windows games. Maybe I am wrong, but if I am right it means that the driver developpers would do well to take Wine seriously, and probably use it as a matter of course, if they want to produce quality code.
I've been in contact with developers at Linux Game Publishing for a while (and am now in fact a Junior Developer for them :D), and from what I gather, regular OpenGL apps on Linux implement hacks to work around bugs/shortcomings in ATI/AMD drivers. Wine is a special case where it's been decided that hacks for specific drivers is a bad idea except in extreme cases, and that there should be generalised solutions for everything (which is, by the way, the whole point of OpenGL :) ).
As a result, the question of hacks in Wine comes up quite often (ATI/AMD card owners want their games to work!) and it's (almost?) always rejected. With any luck, we'll see some sensible, functional, open-source radeonhd drivers coming soonish, so the issue of hacks at the application level can be minimised.