[HD2 General] Shasarak:
Just to clear up a few misconceptions:

- HTC has acknowledged that there are performance issues with a particular ROM, however, as far as we know, these performance issues have absolutely nothing to do with OpenGL games. They affect the HD2's general performance doing non-3D stuff. So far as one can tell, these issues don't seem to affect the British version of the phone. They were discovered by an Italian site. Distribution of HD2's in Italy has been halted. I heard one rumour that the same thing has happened in France.

- HTC never puts proper hardware drivers on their phones - never has and quite possibly never will. If you check out this website you'll see that complaints about lack of proper drivers on HTC phones date back a good three years, and pretty much every phone HTC has ever made has had similar issues. If you go back four or more years, there were no drivers then either; but the hardware HTC bought from Qualcomm ran (for its time) fairly fast even without them, so it wasn't too much of an issue. The trouble started when Qualcomm's latest hardware didn't reach its advertised level of performance without proper drivers.

Three years ago, nothing ran with proper acceleration on HTC's phones, not even HTC's own software. Nowadays the software that is actually built into the phone can make use of hardware acceleration, but third party software that you install yourself typically can't.

This doesn't just apply to 3D acceleration, it causes problems with (for example) video playback on most HTC phones; Coreplayer (3rd party video player) runs a lot slower than HTCAlbum or Windows Media Player on HTC phones, but it runs faster on many other phones. (This is unlikely to be a practical problem on the HD2, as the CPU is powerful enough that Coreplayer can play anything you might reasonably want to play using the CPU alone; but it's a real problem on phones like the original Touch HD, the Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2).

- The blame for this is (arguably) shared between HTC and Qualcomm (the company that makes the chips HTC uses in its phones). Qualcomm has several different prices that they charge for their chips, depending on the level of software support that you buy with them. As I understand it, HTC chooses to pay the amount which allows their own software to get proper hardware support, but they won't pay the more expensive rate which would allow them to make a phone which offers hardware acceleration to third party products. (By contrast, Toshiba pays the full rate). To what extent this is HTC's fault for not paying and to what extent it is Qualcomm's fault for charging more than HTC can afford is unclear.

- The chances of anyone on XDA dev reverse-engineering an OpenGL driver for the Snapdragon chipset in the near future are, I would say, fairly slim. It's not impossible: a guy called Neo has produced a Direct3D driver for the older Qualcomm chipset used in phones like the Touch Pro and Touch Pro2. (See here). However, it's not on a par with what Qualcomm would produce, even after several years of work.

- It's possible that someone might be able to rip off a driver by stealing files from the ROM image of a TG01 or a NeoTouch - however, even if that worked, that would be illegal. Such a driver couldn't be distributed via this website or even advertised on it, otherwise Qualcomm would sue the website for intellectual property theft. So, if you really want to get the entire XDA developers website permanently shut down, then a good way to go about it would be to post here asking for someone to produce a pirated driver.

- The game Xtrakt is designed to directly access Qualcomm hardware; effectively it bundles a 3D library and a hard-wired driver within the game itself, rather than depending on support from the software on the phone. Consequently, the fact that Xtrakt runs smoothly doesn't mean that the phone can accelerate anything else. It's too early to be certain, but it looks as though Electopia may use the same approach.

- The upshot of all this is that I wouldn't get your hopes up for proper 3D acceleration on the HD2 in the foreseeable future.

EDIT: Note that the above is correct as I understand it but if you feel you have a better understanding than I do on any of these points, then feel free to correct me! :)