Posted on by Martin Flöser

Need an ATI R300

The ATI R300 is a very “special” and rather old GPU. It supports OpenGL 2 with one well-known limitation: there is no full non-power-of-two-texture support. KWin has code to handle this situation, nevertheless I broke our R300 support completely one week ago just before the branching of 4.7 without noticing it.

R300 used to be a very important Notebook GPU chip, so we cannot just stop to support it. I am sure that I will fix the regression with the help of users willing to test my patches, but for the long run it’s no solution. Even if we fix this regression I am (after reading our code again) very sure that some new features are not working at all with R300.
Given the situation that we do not notice such regressions during development, it is likely that changes will break support in future again (at least I am not able to develop correctly without testing ;-). This makes it very difficult as we cannot easily bisect. I see only one real solution: I need to have such a GPU to be able to test recent changes for regressions and implement the (rather trivial) adjustments for R300.
If anyone has such an old card and would be willing to donate it for KWin development, please get in contact with me.
Thanks.

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16 Replies to “Need an ATI R300”

  2. Hi Martin,

    an ati 9600 pro could be helpful ?

    01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600]
    01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600] (Secondary)

  3. Can you clarify – do you specifically need an r300 GPU, or do you just need one that runs on the r300 driver?

    r300 driver includes r300-r500 hardware, and i think they all have the same limitation you mentioned. That’s (9500 – X1950). r300 generation only would just be 9500 – 9800, with maybe some low end cards in the X series.

    1. Good point.
      R300 chipset are: Radeon 9700PRO/9700/9500PRO/9500/9600TX, FireGL X1/Z1
      The radeon driver r300 (3D drivers r300c/r300g) is used until R500,RS600/RS690/RS740 chipset cards. Obviously a 9500 card does not support the same features as a x1200, but both use the r300 driver.

      http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

  4. I’m pretty sure I’ve got one or two 😉
    I’ll have to dig for it. iirc it’s a 9600 or so..I may have a 9800 as well.

  5. I got an old x1950pro lying around with an PCIe interface
    but it needs additional power from the supply and has an quite big custom cooler (scythe musashi)

  6. I have an ATI X300 PCI Express Card… I dont need it and I am willing to give it away..
    If your interessted, laß es mich wissen..

  7. While there is nothing wrong with asking for old hardware to users (it is a nice way for them to contribute) I would like to suggest also asking AMD.

    The reason I am suggesting this is that it would pass the message that there is interest from our side in supporting their products. If you manage to establish a productive communication channel with hardware vendors maybe you can get access to other hardware, for example freshly released video cards (which users are less likely to be willing to give away :))

    It is quite probable that you won’t get a positive answer, but it does not hurt to try.

    1. If I might add, the phoronix forums might be a good place to do that too, because “bridgman” is an AMD employee.

      I use multiple R500 cards at work, but at home I only have one laptop with a Radeon 9600. The laptop isn’t in perfect shape (and it’s a friggin huge, ugly, power-drawing pentium 4 2.8Ghz), but if you want it, it’s yours.

    2. I of course thought about it, but considered it as very unlikely that the hardware vendor still has such old cards as they did not produce the cards but only the GPUs.

      Concerning new models I decided when I constructed my current PC that I don’t want to have a modern card, to erm feel the pain of the users 😉 And I already have two OpenGL 3 capable GPUs, so no need for something better

  8. Like jscurtu I have an X300 card lying around. I could hand it off to Sebas so he can bring it to you at Akademy.

  9. Thanks for all the offerings so far. I will have a look at what fits best my needs (by comparing specs and my mainboard capabilities) and will soon get in touch with you.

  11. Sounds like you already found some willing donors, but I too have a PCI-E X300 that I’d be happy to donate to KDE.

    Also, I just have to say that I’m impressed by your dedication to the user experience. Thanks. 🙂

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