x1270 and/or RS690m completely ignored?

[dE .]

Hello everyone! Nice job with the drivers, most cards are supported well.

But it appears the state of xf86-video-ati for the chip x1270 has
remained same for a year; there are no performance gains or bug fixes
which appears very unlikely. So I think there's something wrong with
the configuration, or this might just be true.

x1270 is suppose to belong to the HD series (and it is HD capable).
I'm using Gentoo with the latest development version of mesa, libdri,
xserver and xf86-video-ati but when I switched to the development
unstable branch, instead of things being improved it degraded. Earlier
glxgears used to draw around <500 FPS but now it's ~160. I do have DRI
enabled. This is my xorg.conf -

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "X.org Configured"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	ModulePath   "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/misc/"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/TTF/"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/OTF"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/Type1/"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load  "glx"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "record"
	Load  "dri2"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	#DisplaySize	  330   210	# mm
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "LPL"
	ModelName    "c500"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Card0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
	BoardName   "RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series]"
	BusID       "PCI:1:5:0"
	Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
	Option     "DRI" "on"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Card0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     1
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     4
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     8
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     15
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     16
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
    Group "video"
    Mode 0666
EndSection

And I am in the video group.

After the upgrade the HD videos is also choppy using the xv drivers in
mplayer. The gl drivers gave very low (close to 0) FPS but with
relatively no CPU usage. Relating to this upgrade, I have a feeling
that dri is not being enabled since the bugs when DRI is enabled does
not persist (the Blender bug (explained below)) also the frames drawn
by glxgears is as if dri is off (if I did turn it off, it will draw
the same FPS).

General problems not relating to the upgrade -

X users lot's of CPU (10, 24, 30, 34) at ideal.

compiz only works with indirect rendering which will make it very slow
(dri is slow in general).

With direct rendering on,
http://old.nabble.com/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-X300:-Blender-menus-all-black-(or-white)-td24753052.html
persists.

So I would like to know what's going on and how the drivers support this chip.