I am still skeptical about the directx conformance test part. For one part, we already have this: It's our regular unit tests, to be found in dlls/d3d?/tests/*, dlls/ddraw/tests/*, etc.
OK -- it would definitely not make sense to redo the work if the tests are completed to satisfaction. In that case, I would recommend renaming/clarifying the suggested GSOC project on the Wine wiki. It seems to suggest that conformance tests need to be written.
For end user purposes it would make more sense to write tests testing for known driver bugs and report them to the user, stating a possible solution(usually "hope for a driver update") and possible game specific problems this may cause. I'm not convinced that this is worth the effort however, since usually all we can tell the user is that his driver is broken and that the game won't run no matter what he does.
I'm not convinced that would be worthwhile either. AppDB seems to document those types of things just fine already, and as you say the solution is most likely "wait for a driver update."
Concerning tests, a possible project would be to pick an ATI and Nvidia GPU and make sure that our existing conformance tests pass on both GPUs on at least WinXP, WinVista and Win7. Currently there is no single Windows setup that can run all the tests successfully(usually because the tests are too strict), and that is a shame.
Not even Alexandre's? :-) I don't know that this would necessarily be worth it either. I might be wrong but doesn't even a minor change to a graphics driver have a chance to cause a test to fail? If that's the case, I'd certainly not want to try to get tests passing between WinXP and WinVista/7 since the architectural difference is enormous.
Thank you for the input. I will work on a few other proposals and shoot them to the list soon. Hopefully I can have them formally submitted within the next few days.
As always, thanks!