Oculus Rift on the M17x R4

Short intro and context - I'm a game developer working on a project for the Rift. I use my R4 as my development rig.

As you may or may not know, Oculus recently dropped support for optimus/enduro setups. Leading up to this, some demos worked, others didn't, frame-rates were all over the place. So they cut the cord saying that the mediating intel display gpu couldn't be brought into line. Basically, because the intel GPU is still responsible for drawing pixels to screen (yes, even when you're using your discreet GPU), the Rift can't get direct access to the nvidia/amd GPU (which it needs to do to pull off anything resembling acceptable performance). It's related to the reason you get worse performance in optimus mode - there's a middleman between the discreet GPU and the screen. It's just more exaggerated in this case.

Last night I rolled over to dedicated mode using the keyboard command (fn-f7). It turns out that the mux switch really does do what it's supposed to do and totally cuts the intel GPU out of the display chain.

And the Rift works - or rather, a DK2 using SDK 0.8 works. There's still a few months leading up to release.

TL;DR if you want to use the rift and you are buying new hardware - shop carefully and avoid optimus/enduro configurations. If you want to use the rift and you still have an alienware with a I/D GFX switch (or PEG option in the bios) you can - you just have to go dedicated and drop optimus. If you have a BGA alienware laptop... prepare to be disappointed.