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Luos
New Participant
January 7, 2015

DK2 barely working with MSI GT70 2 PC Dominator

I've already seen a few threads on the web explaining why the Oculus won't, or barely work with the GT70 2PC notebook. the reason why? mostly because it's a notebook :P it kind of works in Extended mode. but not with the Direct HDM. you get an error that has to do with the rendering GPU. not sure what it was anymore. but I was wondering, will this get fixed with the consumer version? I'm now borrowing a DK2 from my school, but I am really planning on getting the CV for myself. but with a laptop which isn't compatible with the Oculus (or vice versa) I'm not sure.

I was wondering if other people had the same problem? I think the reason behind it is because of the fact that the MSI GT70 2PC Dominator is one of the first laptops with a GTX870m Graphics card in it. and maybe Oculus doesn't support that one yet. really hoping that this will get fixed in the new versions of either hardware or software from Oculus, cause the headset is bringing great options to my study and school.

    2 replies

    cybereality
    Inspiring
    January 7, 2015
    Laptops usually have poor Oculus support due to issues with Optimus and multi-GPU setups. I'm not sure that applies to your computer, however it's not surprising there are problems. I can't say when these issues will be completely solved, so I usually recommend people use a desktop machine with a dedicated graphics card.
    AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
    Torrm
    New Participant
    January 24, 2015
    Hey,

    I am not sure if you are still checking this thread but it may serve as good information for anyone else experiencing the same problem. I received my DK2 on the 21/01/2015 and I also have the MSI GT70 2PC Laptop, after ordering the DK2 I read some of these posts and had myself worrying, telling my Fiance I had just bought something that wouldn't work was not an option.

    The problem is (I believe) that even though the laptop uses the Nvidia Chip for processing (if selected) it will still be passed through the Intel chip to be rendered to the laptop display. The HDMI port however is directly linked to the Nvidia chip, essentially what this means is that the end result is the laptop display and the rift are being rendered on two different GPUs - Which Direct To Rift won't like.

    The Solution
    Fortunately MSI have linked the Mini Display Port AND the HDMI to the Nvidia Chip so after a lot of messing about I finally figured out the solution.

    What you will need is a second monitor that runs at 1920x1080 and accepts either Display Port / HDMI / DVI, mine supports DVI so what I did was use a DVI to HDMI cable and then a HDMI to Mini Display Port adapter all for the monitor (was the easiest for me to get). Now connect the Rift as recommended to the HDMI port and disable the laptop screen - This means the second Monitor and the rift use the Nvidia Chip (and it is a 6GB chip so why not!).

    Now as you have essentially completely avoided the Intel Chip things will start to work a lot better, once I had set this up I was able to run the unity demo for the first time amongst several other demos such as the UE4 rollercoaster - all in Direct to Rift Mode, so much easier! Now I am still experimenting but it does appear that setting the Rift as your primary monitor further improves the setup, on this very laptop I managed to set up a little project in UE4 using the Rift in Direct to Rift mode and with a few optimizations I was getting 70-75fps which is excellent.

    It appears this is one of very few laptops that function well with the Rift, good job MSI! Sorry for the lengthy post but I wanted to be as clear as possible - any questions let me know!
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