From a client perspective it is still the same thing if you're using cairo since that includes the fallback code already. But if you're making XRender requests

From a client perspective it is still the same thing if you're using cairo since that includes the fallback code already. But if you're making XRender requests directly then yeah it wouldn't be. (I don't know of many applications that do this, ideally it's something you want in the toolkit or drawing library)