XAA vs. EXA in old hardware support

[Alan Cox]

Ar Maw, 2006-06-20 am 11:05 +0300, ysgrifennodd Daniel Stone:
> If all you were doing was playing xtank, then this would make sense.
> But on normal desktops, it's a performance _loss_.  A seriously
> noticeable loss.  If you really play xtank that much, you can use XAA,
> surely.

I'm curious why you think it would be a loss. For a normal desktop case
it would not be much of a gain and may be performance neutral. Why do
you expect a noticable performance loss ?