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February 9th, 2019 14:00
Dell G7 connecting to Oculus Rift
I purchased a Dell G7 to use with an Oculus Rift. I ran the compatibility tool from Oculus to verify that the laptop specs matched the Oculus specs. No problems there. When I tried to connect the Rift to the G7 the HDMI and USB headset connectors are not recognized. After more research it looks like the HDMI connector is going through the on board graphics card before it goes to the NVIDIA GTX 1060. In searching the internet I have come across several posts where people with a G7 have gotten them to work with the Rift. I also came across a post (for a different Dell laptop) that suggested buying the HTC Vive Link box.
Has anybody gotten the G7 to work with the Rift? If so is there some magic involved? Is there a way that I can force the HDMI connector to use the NVIDIA GTX card?
Thanks for the help.
jphughan
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February 9th, 2019 20:00
If the HDMI output is physically wired to the Intel GPU, there's no way to force it to go straight to the NVIDIA GPU. That's just how the system is set up at a hardware level. The desktop equivalent would be to imagine that your laptop is connected to one graphics card and you're asking for it to be wired to another graphics card without being able to move the cable.
As for getting it to work, fyi "G7" isn't a specific model; it's a model range. As of this writing, Dell's website shows three separate models listed within the G7 range: the 7588, the 7590, and the 7790. It's possible that the people who are having success have a different model in the G7 range than you do. I suppose it's also possible that there is in fact some way to get VR working even in systems that use NVIDIA Optimus rather than having the NVIDIA GPU wired directly to the display output, but to my knowledge Intel GPUs don't support VR passthrough. I believe that's partly why Dell's product pages tag certain systems as "VR Ready" -- they would be the ones that have a display output wiring setup that would allow VR.
If you're curious, the reason most laptops with discrete GPUs still have all outputs wired to the Intel GPU is related to battery life. When the discrete GPU is set up to operate as a render-only device that simply passes completed video frames to the Intel GPU for output to displays (that's NVIDIA Optimus), it means that the discrete GPU can be completely shut down when there's nothing graphics-intensive going on. By comparison, if the NVIDIA GPU were directly wired to certain display outputs, then it would have to remain active whenever a display was connected to that output, even if nothing graphics-intensive was going on. However, the downside to the Optimus setup is that you can't use certain features that require the NVIDIA GPU to have direct control of the display output and that the Intel GPU doesn't support, such as VR, G-Sync, 5K resolution, stereoscopic 3D, and I think some others. That's why some gaming-oriented laptops wire outputs directly to the discrete GPU, sacrificing battery life for functionality -- but not all do. And then there are the very high-end workstation models like the Precision 700 Series that have a BIOS option that allows you to choose which GPU controls which display outputs, but that requires extra motherboard complexity and cost, which is probably why it's such a rare capability.