recent ati cards opacity/transparency issues?

[Wim De Smet]

Hi list,

I've been trying to track down where an annoying bug I've been dealing
with comes from. Basically, any text that is supposed to look blurred
or has a non-1 opacity value set, shows as a lightgrey box with some
black text on it or, worse, depending on the colour it can show as
completely unreadable set of boxes.

I've reported a bug on ubuntu which has a screenshot:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/572310
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/46595697/Screenshot.png

Right now seeing it on a hd 3450 (rv620 chipset). I've observed the
same problem on a box with a hd4870.

There hasn't been any movement on that bug report, and it seemed to
happen both with the free (which I'm using now) and the closed source
drivers. Which leads me to believe it might not be the driver's fault,
but then I'd like to rule that out. It does seem to be ATI card
specific, so it must be an interaction between the higher level
libraries and the drivers.

So questions: Is anyone able to reproduce this and if not, what other
part of the graphics stack could it be down to? I'd really like some
help tracking this down, as it's a bit of a nightmare on the modern
web where blur and transparency are very common.

cheers,
Wim

P.S.: I'm currently not subscribed to the list so please CC me.