A few days ago Novell launched GLX & Compiz, their contribution to what is turning into a race for the 3d desktop, for some reason. Red Hat now follows suit with their Accelerated Indirect GL X (AIGLX) project. The project wiki comments on the differences.

"XGL is a different X server. [AIGLX] is a more incremental change which is slated to become part of Xorg. We don't believe that replacing the entire X server is the right path, and that improving it incrementally is a better way to modernize it. XGL spent the last few months of its development behind closed doors and was dropped on the community as a finished solution. Unfortunately, it wasn't peer reviewed during its development process, and its architecture doesn't sit well with a lot of people."

AIGLX will be integrated into the upcoming version of Fedora, although from the look of things, the software is still pre-beta. It doesn't work with a lot of the ATI cards and NVidia is left out completely, due to a missing extension in their binary driver.

Cards known to work now are the ATI Radeo 7000 through 9250 (r100 and r200 generations) and Intel's i830 through i945. Other chipsets with free 3d drivers may work, but no one has tested them yet.