You can still run XOrg with the old XOrg-accelerated intel driver or modesetting atop KMS, so even staying within Intel+XOrg you can have very different renderi

You can still run XOrg with the old XOrg-accelerated intel driver or modesetting atop KMS, so even staying within Intel+XOrg you can have very different rendering paths. I used to run the XOrg-accelerated stuff as it was faster and used less power on my laptop, but once my machine got new enough for SNA it became too buggy vs. modesetting.