ATI and the "terror of" sax2

Everybody who as an ati graphics card knows that sometimes it is so hard to get it work with linux(At lest with suse), and if you have the (Bad) luck of having an old one, you can not use the proprietary drivers, instead, you must use the open source drivers, unless if you are using Xorg 7.0 or below. In this case only the version 8.28 or below will work.
The last proprietary version that worked well was the 8.40(for the most recent models) but it did not have AIGLX support. That support was later introduced with version 8.42, but the performance was poor, specially noted if you were using compiz-fusion. With the recent versions I did not saw any major improvements in performance with compiz-fusion, but openGL games (like Quake) got much better, that means that compiz-fusion will have to wait.
Downloading the proprietary drivers and then installing in opensuse 10.3 must be done with care. You need to uninstall any previous version and only than install the new one. After that comes the problem because, every time that I use sax2 command, it gives the no 3d support error. I've tried to follow ati instructions but had no success, the only thing that works is not using sax2 but use the aticonfig only. The catch is that with sax things seems to work better, so, instead of using the downloaded proprietary drivers you can always use the version that exist in the repositories. For me this is the best solution because it is easier to install and work with sax. The other problem with the drivers is that there is additional manual configuration to put things running smoothly. I'm hoping that the next version of sax comes with some kind of solution for this problem, because many users quit using linux when many manual configuration is needed.