Some from steam, bf4 from origin and a couple of standalone games and none of them worked.

yeah the intel hd 4000 is onboard graphics. Yeah I have tried disabling it in system devices and I have even tried uninstalling it. But if I put my laptop onto the alienware dedicated mode where the 970m is the main gpu and intel graphics are totally removed (looks like they aren't even loaded onto the system) then the 970m works flawlessly.

Im using Windows 10 64 bit with all the latest updates.