Rift works in extended, but not in direct (Optimus laptop)

[zorque]

LATEST UPDATE:
This problem (at least for most people having this problem) has been identified as resulting from the Optimus technology. The high performance GPU is not actually connected directly to any of the display ports (not the monitor, not the DP, not the HDMI). So even with Optimus disabled, you are still running through the low-power card to get to your displays... This is something the Oculus display driver has not taken into account. Unfortunately, there seems to be no ETA, if ever, on a fix for this. We'll have to wait and see if the Oculus devs can mod the driver to account for Optimus setups. Meanwhile, the recommendation is to develop on a desktop with a dedicated graphics card. Sigh.

I am creating this thread to track people having issues with THIS EXACT PROBLEM:
* Rift works normally in extended mode (blue LED, video, rot & pos tracking work fine)
* In direct mode, the LED stays orange and no video appears on the Rift HMD.
However, the 'mirror' window does show up on the display and the positional and rotational
tracking both work when you launch a game or demo in direct mode.
PLEASE do not post here if you have a "similar" problem. That only clutters the thread and impedes progress.

Objective of this thread:
* Get an idea of how many people are affected by Direct mode not working.
* Determine 100% whether this is a laptop / Optimus / NVidia problem
* See if the community has (or can) come up with a workaround.

Notes:
* It doesn't matter if you use HDMI or the DVI adapter
* This seems to be a problem with Optimus.
* It has been suggested that the Rift direct-mode driver is sending the video signal directly to the NVidia chipset,
which we can't see because (even with Optimus 'disabled') the final monitor output still goes through the Intel chipset.
* I have tested with Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on Dell and MSI hardware (both with NVidia/Intel/Optimus),
and have the exact same problem.
* Oculus support has (mostly) acknowledged that this is likely an Optimus issue, but has said they don't
know when (or even IF) this will be addressed. We need to keep this thread clear and concise to both
show them the problem needs to be addressed, and to give them a head start on troubleshooting.

OK, here we go. If you're posting here, please include:
* Brief description of your rig (no cfg files needed to start). i.e. the rigs I am testing on:
MSI GT70,I7, 24G RAM, SSD HDD/SATA secondary, NVidia GTX780m, Win8x64
Dell XPS L502X, i5, 8G RAM, SATA, NVidia GT540m, Win7x64
Dell XPS L502X, i5, 8G RAM, SATA, NVidia GT540m, Win8.1x64
* also indicate whether you're willing to help troubleshoot, and to what degree
(driver uninstalls, system OS wipes / reinstalls, etc)

Thanks, everybody, and I hope we can all help each other out.
-Mike

[HRossi]

Hello, I have the same problem as well. My notebook is an Alienware 17 R2 with 980m GPU plus an intel HD 4600 GPU. One question that came into my head was, does anyone ever tried to use thouse usb-hdmi conectors with oculus rift on it ?

[cybereality]

USB-to-HDMI adapters don't work. They are basically external video cards and can't run a game.

[ronny77]

Same problem for me 😞

Have been happy with my medion erazer and oculus rift dk2 for some time, but new SDK wont work for me

My graphics card is a NVIDIA GTX 780M with Optimus Technology

[cybereality]

Sorry, laptops are not supported. See here: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=26029

[theothercraigj]

This is crazy.. I have an NVIDIA 970m. As fast, or faster than most gaming desktops.. They should fix this problem

[enzedda]

"theothercraigj" wrote:
This is crazy.. I have an NVIDIA 970m. As fast, or faster than most gaming desktops.. They should fix this problem

No it's your problem.
Maybe reading about your rig and it's incompatibility may have saved you money and frustration ?
Warnings about laptops are very explicit and obvious.
Just requires some reading and maybe some understanding of "not compatible" and what it means.
A 970M and a laptop? (Optimus)
Oh dear.

And, Cybereality, you should make sure that these warnings are now more easily seen not just mentioned .

[Anonymous]

"enzedda" wrote:

"theothercraigj" wrote:
This is crazy.. I have an NVIDIA 970m. As fast, or faster than most gaming desktops.. They should fix this problem

No it's your problem.
Maybe reading about your rig and it's incompatibility may have saved you money and frustration ?
Warnings about laptops are very explicit and obvious.
Just requires some reading and maybe some understanding of "not compatible" and what it means.
A 970M and a laptop? (Optimus)
Oh dear.

And, Cybereality, you should make sure that these warnings are now more easily seen not just mentioned .

I must say that I have that same kind of Laptop (970m with a i7) since april 2015 and the Rift has always been working great with it : done a lot of simulations, always been working perfectly without changing anything, exactly like in my desktop rig (GTX980).

But I havn't used it for one month and havn't changed anything in the laptop (no drivers installations, no new firmwares) except installing Unreal Engine 4 (that I've removed since) and I've retried it last week : Oculus runtime crashes everytime I use the Direct to Rift mode, but the Extended still works perfectly.

[eesteve92]

I am testing with a Dell M4800 and it works well with the 0.7 SDK as long as the Intel graphics are disabled (BIOS). For my application it would be ideal to have the Intel graphics enabled to leverage Quick Sync for some acceleration operations (video decode/encode). The GPU is connected directly to the HDMI out on this laptop (no software MUX), so the Intel should not create a bottle neck for processing. In this configuration, not being able to enable the Intel without a driver crash does seem like a bug.

I am able to run with both the Intel and NVidia enabled on a desktop system.

Steve

[DavidLively]

Working configuration:


2015 MacBook Pro (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Windows 8.1 (Bootcamp / dual boot - NOT a VM)
AMD Radeon R9 M370X
Windows 8.1
Oculus runtime 0.8.

DK2 connected to the HDMI output on the laptop.

Works great when running an app in Unity (I'm a developer). Haven't tried many other demos, but they all seem to work.

It's worth noting that Apple has (of course) their own proprietary GPU switching technology - NOT Optimus, even on the NVIDIA models - which is unavailable under Windows. (The system always uses the discrete GPU - the integrated GPU doesn't even show up in device manager, the Oculus log doesn't mention it, etc.)

I was not able to get it working under Windows 10 on this machine, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying.