I’ve been using an Oculus Rift DK2 on an AMD laptop with dual graphics and have encountered the following error when using OVR runtime 0.43 or later.

There is a problem with your Rift configuration.
Interfering software is preventing the Rift from activating. Loaded UMD is reported as ‘aticfx32.dll’.

This causes whichever direct-to-rift demo is in use to start but no output to the Rift.

The laptop has “switchable graphics”. Essentially this is a Radeon 8650M for low power tasks and an 8970M/M290X for gaming and high-performance tasks.

If the software used with the Oculus Rift is set to run using the 8650M [power saving] in Catalyst Control Center’s Switchable Graphics Application Settings, the software will work correctly with the Rift albeit at greatly reduced performance. If the software is set to use the 8970M/M290X[high performance], the black screen and “aticfx32.dll” error will be shown.

It seems that the OVR runtime is not recognising the switch from the low power to high performance cards as the application starts.

The only workaround I have so far found is to downgrade the OVR runtime to 0.42.

It is likely that the bug will be eliminated in future versions of the OVR runtime. In the mean time, I intend to experiment with different AMD Catalyst driver versions to see if that makes any difference. I am currently using AMD Catalyst version 14.12.

If you’ve had success with another Catalyst version and dual-graphics on a OVR runtime later than 0.42, please let me know in the comments section.