First, sorry to read of your frustration.
IMHO neither the radeon nor the radeonhd drivers in openSUSE-11.2 as packaged work well for special desktop effects. As noted by michael_cheah, there are improvements in the Radeon Drivers that you will see in openSUSE-11.3. For example, on my Dell Studio 1537 laptop with an HD3450, on 11.3 RC2 I see a massive improvement with special desktop effects and the open source radeon driver (although it does NOT have the performance of the FGLRX proprietary driver).
However having typed that, my experience an on ATI Radeon 9200 pro is even in 11.3 (based on an assessment of RC1) the radeon and radeonhd drivers are NOT as good as those in, for example, in the latest Fedora-13, and possibly not as in the latest Ubuntu releases. Definitely Fedora are applying patches for Radeon and Radeonhd that are not yet accepted upstream (and hence have not made it downstream to openSUSE), and I suspect the same is true for the latest Ubuntu based distributions.
This is not an issue for me, as I typically switch OFF special desktop effects, as I prefer to use the CPU cycles that they consume for other CPU intensive activities (such as multimedia rendering).
“something like that” ?? Note your options are radeon and radeonhd driver, where the support for the radeonhd driver is being reduced in favour of the radeon driver. Also, if you do try 11.3, the configuration wizard sax2 is being dropped.
What are ‘the Xorg ones’ ?? Note you will NOT get special desktop effects from the FBDEV nor the VESA driver.