My new Lenovo T500 has two graphics cards: an integrated Intel GM45 and an ATI Radeon 3650. Surely, with the myriad choices of card and driver, I could find one that gave me 3D performance, 2D compositing (true translucency), and good battery life, right? Wrong.

Here are my results after ~24h of futzing with drivers. The OS is Ubuntu Karmic. I believe the driver authors are all aware of the shortcomings, and all this garbage should be fixed someday. I didn't test out 3D acceleration, but you and I both know that ATI's better than Intel.

I decided to run with the Intel card and drivers - if I really need to game, I'll install Windows on another partition and reboot.