How does this work with windows 3d acceleration? Since it's another display driver than the RTX card, can this cause any issues like micro stutters when gaming? And how efficient is it in terms of performance? I got 3 monitors running at 120hz and need a virtual display for a complicated scene, so I'm hoping I can use this as a solution

I can not thank you enough for this. I run a couple of "sometimes headless" machines where sometimes there is a need to be in front of them, sometimes remote is what is needed, and leaving a monitor powered on 24/7 just incase is just crazy. I would personally love to have an option that was somehow able to automatically disable the virtual display when a physical display is actually powered on, but thats just me swinging for the fence, lol. Seriously tho, amazing work. This is going to make so many people very very happy.

Thank you so much for developing this! This is really useful for making high-res screenshots and screenrecordings, where you can zoom-in in post while retaining a high quality!

Thanks for this! Just ordered an RTX 4070, but I only have a 60Hz monitor. Glad to know I'll be able to enjoy 120Hz on my TV :)

Thank you very much! Yes, as mentioned before, a version with 10-bit and HDR support would be incredible! ✨

OMG ive spent 7 hours trying to find ways to seset this up for remote access. thank you so much.

Damn nice work mike, hope you still had fun developing this! :)

Thanks! Your drivers allowed me to setup virtual dual screen 4k PC desktops inside a Vision Pro from my PC laptop.

Great video! Amazing way to add tons and TONS more windows to your OBS stream by extracting the screen or just small screen captures without having an insane amount of monitors, thanks for this video man this works for so many different people doing so many different things!

my bro you are a genious! i've been searching high and low for an application like this. Many thanks!

This works great, thanks a lot! My steam deck and moonlight setup was working fine until one day it started outputting a black screen unless my monitor was on and nothing I did could fix it. I swear I'm gettting a smoother image using this well. This first game I tested I used to get tiny microstutters in, now its buttery smooth!

Thank you so much for this video, I was looking for a solution since my computer did not detect my iPad as a second monitor and now I can! Greetings from Chile and keep it up!!

been a pain trying to use my headless server computer and this fixed that issue, thank you

Thank you so very much for creating this! You're a legend!

I was your 1000th star on the repository just now - congrats and thank you!

This is awesome. Solved a big issue for me! Thank you.

Incredible help to the community, thank you!

Beautiful. For various reasons I need to use TightVNC to use my work laptop effectively from my desk, which unlike normal Windows RDP, cannot ask the system you're connecting to for a display configuration matching your client system. This finally allows me a way to bring my third monitor into play (a dummy HDMI plug got me the second display.)

Thank you so much for this! For some reason I can't get HDR working though. Not a huge deal but for anyone having the issue where you get a "fatal video encoding error" when connecting from moonlight (im using an nvidia shield btw), I had to disable HDR from within moonlight even if none of the displays had HDR enabled on windows. I'm able to connect in 4k now but it seems like my 3070 isn't able to keep up with the encoding or something as the moonlight stats show the incoming video is ~11fps. I saw on reddit people suggesting to turn of shadowplay/nvidia overlay as well as the xbox game bar so I'm trying that now. Either way, great work and thanks for the succinct video! EDIT: some additional troubleshooting steps was to disable HEVC and use AVC (h264) instead as well as lowering the stream bitrate but it doesn't seem to be a client issue. On my host PC in my nvidia control panel i'm noticing its not actually showing the display here, leading me to believe its using my CPUs integrated graphics or something. Though on the moonlight stream statistics it does say "NVIDIA 3070" so I'm really not sure. I'll fall back to 1080p for now but if anyone finds a solution I'd love to know!

Wildly helpful, thank you!

Mike. Thank you! I have Windows 10 and you had a link provided that worked for my computer! Fantastic! You are the man! Thank you.

This is 100 % subscription worthy thank you!

Man this is amazing and exactly what I needed for moonlight, no more trying to make dummyplugs from Amazon work, thank you

Thanks for the video! I literally needed this today.

Thanks for the video and for the driver , it helped me on a headless system sittuation.

Thank you so much for this, you've really saved my neck, you earn yourself a subscriber!

Thanks This solved the issues running teamviewer on the headless server with Display ports

Nice this is great. Do you know of any way to replace actual monitor with a virtual one? Basically I'd like to split my virtual monitor (and not using fancyzones or VDM or DisplayFusion - they don't work for this purpose) I mean I want to either: Split my ultrawide into two displays, OR add padding so my display is only on the right side of my ultrawide. You seem to know your stuff, is there any way to do this from your knowledge?

Thanks for the software!! If you can add 10bit color that would be amazing!!!If you want a custom resolution you can add it in the option.txt file before adding it as legacy hardware in device manager.

This is awesome, thank you!

Mike any updates on HDR? Keep up the great work

You did a great work, thank you so much!

This is exactly what I was looking for, you are a godsend. I have a PC I use almost exclusively through VNC and wanted multi-monitor support. One thing I think would be nice is if it could mimic more than just 1 additional monitor. My ideal setup would be no physical monitor connected at all and VNC is just how I use it (unless something catastrophic happens forcing me to use it directly).

Thank you so much you solved my issues with this!

good stuff. Thanks Mike.

Hey thanks for all the hard work. I installed this and it works great for using my Tesla GPU as a display driver now. The only thing now is that I have a lot of input lag. Are there any settings that you would recommend?

holy this feature is huge. thank you very much! sadly the latest version (HDR support) didn't work for me but the previous version works. I guess my Windows 11 haven't got the most latest Windows update.

Can I choose the option "Duplicate" instead of "Extend"? I only have one real display. My goal is to leave the physical display off while simulating a second display on, allowing me to use NVIDIA Moonlight whenever I want, because after a few hours of the real display being turned off, the app only shows a black screen.

Thanks for this content. Trying to setup a virtual desktop for sunshine. When I run dxgi-info.exe in the cmd prompt I can see the new display I made as an output associated with my GPU (RTX 3060 Ti), however when I put in the output name (\\.\DISPLAY13) into the audio/visual config menu I get the following error in sunshine: Fatal: Unable to find display or encoder during startup. Fatal: Please ensure your manually chosen GPU and monitor are connected and powered on. Any idea why this is?

WOW, good stuff. OfCourse subscribing and thank you.

Mike, thank you so much for your efforts! All works great, except one thing - mouse cursor is lagging on the virtual desktop, im having host cursor chasing clients`s one all the time no matter what resolution. My GPU is nvidia rtx 4090 so perfomance should not be an issue. Any thought on that? anyway so far its a great tool that makes my life much smoother, keep it up!

Many thanks , Work like a charm !! Just a question , how to auto log to Sunshine when start the computer ? That way i can install the PC in other location without monitor and use only the TV . Thanks !

Exactly what i was looking for! I use my pc remotely from my laptop and the screen was stuck with 4:3 res after my previous 16:9 broke and had to plug a 4:3 one to debug some vnc stuff. Thx

What soft of streaming desktop can show 8k and 120 resolution? VD only can 2k that can be visible, and Immersed has only 16 mb bitrate, the text will be blurring. What soft to stream desktop do you use?

I have watched several of your vids on sun/moon, thanks for those. I am still trying to find though how I can have moonlight run from the virtual monitor rather than my desktop monitor which I also want to be able to use. Is this possible? You mention using sunshine on the virt disp driver but I didn't see any vids you did for setting it up. Thanks for all your efforts

Thanks! I switched to a quest pro for monitor so i want to try higher resolutions then what my physical display can do. I was able to make a custom 8K resolution in the nvidia control panel but it's still using the same options as my old 4k, 30hz monitor. I'm using a 3090.

This work flawlessly! Can you do a video of how to emulate a GPU for light/retro gaming? (I have a virtual computer running on a NAS but there is no graphics card, and I would like to use the virtual computer to run sunshine).

Subbed mostly because you have a fallout shelf and now I want to see your other videos 😁

This is awesome, thanks for your efforts! One thing I'd like to point out is that it's not 100% friendly with Sunshine. I find I still need some sort of monitor connected to get the virtual one working, as Sunshine says "couldn't find any working encoder" when I try to use my virtual monitor (I set it to /.//display9 in the sunshine video settings as what it showed in the dxgi-info.exe tool for sunshine). I, later, realized I had to leave that field at default and boot on my main monitor and *THEN* set windows to display on the virtual display only. Even that wouldn't work as sunshine would go blank or just plain old freeze on my real monitor screen. I eventually used to DO and UNDO commands (DisplaySwitch.exe /external for DO & /internal for UNDO) to get it to work. I didn't find these instructions anywhere, so I am wondering if I am missing something on the instructions. Trying to use it without those commands in Sunshine yields either an error or blank screen, depending on what I do. I tried on 3 hosts, 2 work with the DO/UNDO (laptop & Rog Ally - figured I'd stream from it to tablet), while the 3rd which is a PC with monitor does not work at all). A bit confused on why just selecting my 2nd display only while I am using primary display isn't working. Also wondering why I can't just force it to show off /.//display9 (a limitation of this method perhaps as no encoder is found for the virtual display?). Sorry for the long post. I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work and after about 12 hours, I got it kinda working, but it's still unstable at times and doesn't work with the DO/UNDO commands. Thanks again, though for everything. You're awesome man!

Hi there, I'm looking for a specific solution and am not sure I am at the right place, but I will describe it and see if using a virtual display makes sense. What I currently want to do is create a pass-through video driver which presents itself to windows as refresh rate A but drives a true external monitor at refresh rate B. The exact use-case is to be able to run applications at 120Hz but then drive a 240Hz display, and inject black frames for every other frame to the monitor. This is basically used for, well, black frame insertion :) Windows is rendering to 120Hz but the video driver is actually running at 240Hz behind the scenes. I of course want to ensure that I'm doing all rendering with the native GPU (in my case NVidia GPU). Does this sound like something that can be done using a virtual display? Thank you in advance!

you are the fucking man helped me setup gamestreaming throughout my whole home

Hi thanks for your work. i desperately searched to extend desktop (like real extension for icons like in android or apple phone) on my laptop with no results and then you came in. So i installed your driver following your video and i use win + P to extend. So cool . Then use the feature : make screen your main display after choosing the screen you want. just for people to know An important feature is the win+shift+ arrow key to quickly change windows from one screen to another and it works well. be carefull You can drag and drop icon like with a real screen but you dont see where they fall. i have a question do you need to select display or graphics card to instal the legacy driver? (i have and old pc with uhd 520 i choose graphic card it was the only display choice that i had and it worked) did i create a new virtual graphic card? thanks a lot. Subscribed

If I understand correctly, this can be working as a dummy hdmi/displayport for streaming while monitor is turned off?

thank you for the incredible useful software! So if I need to use only one resolution on my host PC, I have to keep only one proper resolution in "option" file and it will work after the reboot?

thanks a lot, it's working great with sunshine!!! Is there any way to get this monitor to be recognized as a touchscreen? If so, could you record a video showing how?

You saved me buying a new headless dongle, so please share in the savings! :)

Hey man, I've been using moonlight+sunshine remotely for a couple of days and it was working perfectly but I think my monitor switched off due to power save settings. Now moonlight's showing a black screen but teamviewer works as it creates its virtual adapter. Do you think this video could help me out and work with moonlight+sunshine?

Hey Mike! Thanks for the amazing tutorials and the awesome virtual display. Unfortunately my samsung tv runs on the resolution 4096 x 2160 native. Could it be added by any chance?

Great stuff. Is it possible to add a virtual 7.1 sound card so that I can stream to the Nvidia Shield in my home theater?

@MikeTheTech Thank you for this. Is there any expiry involved because its certificate has expiry of 10/14/24?

Hi Mike fantastic this has solved a lot of my issues can’t thank you enough. Nothing worse than playing sunshine and it boots up in 720p all the time. I seem to not be able to get 120hz though. Can only seem to get 60hz using the HDR version.

Hey Mike, thanks for this video! Folks like you are carrying the open source community on your back. :) I had a minor performance issue when I tried to implement this that I guess has been reported in this comment section -- my virtual monitor does not actual display the intended fps when using Moonlight. My setup is Moonlight -> iPad, 2732 x 2048, 120 fps (which I added to options.txt and selected), but I'm getting stuttering and about 15 fps. I know this is not a hardware limitation because I'm able to stream my primary laptop display at the same res and fps to my ipad with no issue. Wondering perhaps the virtual display does not use GPU acceleration? I guess this is not the best place to ask for help, but I saw that you had videos regarding Moonlight setup on your channel too, so I was thinking maybe you might know something. Thanks!

Thank you very much. Now i am able to sunshine stream with monitor off. Using this for sunshine moonlight game stream on my samsung tab s8 plus. HDR looks somewhat weird though in ff7 remake game. pinkish color on yellow color. Not sure HDR issue from sunshine or the tablet itself. The game HDR looks great on monitor. Anyway thank you again.

Oddly enough, with your fork I do get more resolutions, but can still only choose 60hz?

Hi question, is this what I needed for example I just want to stream a game using moonlight + sunshine and I would like to output the display on my mobile device only so that anyone can use my PV while gaming?

Looks like the output name of the virtual display would change on every restart. Is there anyway to prevent it to change it?

Thank you very much for this! Is there any possibility of further customization for available resolutions? I recently started using Sunshine to stream my workhorse system to a Moonlight client running on my Surface Book 2- but it has a relatively weird aspect ratio of 3:2 (3000 x 2000 for my model; 3240 x 2160 for the bigger one). I searched for a virtual monitor solution like this in hopes of avoiding having to go into Nvidia control panel & change my resolution settings every time I stream to the Surface Book.

Can't seem to get this to work, followed everything to the letter. Matched the correct settings in Moonlight with the settings for the monitor in Display, I've got the correct Output Name set in Sunshine but I'm still stuck with the black screen. I've also tried setting the virtual display as my main display but that didn't work either. The virtual display is active and working so I don't know why Sunshine can't seem to recognize it.

This is super Mike! I got this working but I want a dual monitor setup in moonlight, if that is possible? How do I add a second virtual monitor? Thx

Thanks for this! Question, to update to a new release is it necessary to uninstall the driver or can you update from device manager?

I would love to see a feature where I can specify which GPU the virtual display is attached to. For example,, dGPU instead of always choosing iGPU.

Thanks for your hard work! Wanted to ask about how to use this and make sure sunshine/moonlight uses that display to open games on via playnite/steam big picture?

Thankkk youu 🥰

Would this support Miracast from the virtual display? I've got a headless machine that I want to cast to a TV, but I am always getting the message that I need to connect a cable. Tried an HDMI dongle to no avail, so your virtual display is my next step.

I was able to do this and add the driver to device manager but I'm not seeing it show up on my system/display items like in your video. Any recommendations?

Hi, when restarting the PC, it sets the resolutions back to default, anyway around that?

Bro you saved me; so I have only a ultrawide 5120x1440, but on steam deck I use remote play to play on my 4k tv docked . Issue is my monitor only supports up to 2560x1440 not 4k because of Nvidia limitations for no damn reason. well this saved me I made a virtual 4k monitor 120hz just like my tv and before using remote play on steam deck docked with jsaux hdmi 2.1 dock I went to big picture mode and set primary display the virtual one. Now I’m able to play downstairs at 4k 120hz using steam remote play perfectly. My specs are 5800x3d and rtx 4090, I play with steam deck oled but when I dock I play it via remote play

i have the virtual display but my laptop slows down abit when i have it, is there anyway to remove it and the reequip it when i need it?

Hey Mike I was wondering if you can help getting me setup with Aster sunshine/moonlight currently run sunlight on my pc in my room but my wife likes to play games in the living room on our NVIDIA shield 2019. Id like to get this set up. I will pay for you to help me

Is there any way to setup the virtual monitor so that when on my desktop, I'm not able to drag anything onto it? It seems like it would be easy for me to lose windows that accidentally get dragged onto the virtual monitor.

works nicely with sunshine host on windows and moonlight client on android tv. also does 4k 120hz with HDR which is awesome. BUT...for some reason the virtual display driver becomes the main display even after deselecting that option in display settings and once you quit your moonlight desktop/steam big picture session the main monitor plugged into host pc goes blank or becomes secondary display. you then have to use controller (in my case) in mouse emulation mode, revert the display setting on the client tv (android) and then go back to using the host pc as normal. also display settings window remains bound to the virtual display screen and only disabling it in device manager brings back the window to the host pc monitor. is this a quirk in sunshine/moonlight or windows or the display driver is the million dollar question.

Help, i need the resolution as 2k "2560x1440" at 90, 120, 144, whatever, but it only shows 60fps, so i uninstalled everything, (even deleted the certificates and rebooted), modified the option.txt file to add these, and i indeed can select and use these resolutions, but the mouse does not show up while streaming on moonlight (on teamviewer it does), and enabling the stats of moonlight the stream is at 30something fps (90 is selected on moonlight settings, no vsync) and the decoding and rendering are too at 30something so it seems it is streaming at like a third of the resolution i selected (which was 90fps in this case) , but even after undoing this and installing the original files, mouse still does not show up and selecting the 1080p resolution that does have 90, 120, 144 etc framerate options, the behaviour is the same while streaming with moonlight and 60fps or more selected on the moonlight settings.

2 questions, I installed it exactly as you said, it shows up in Display adapters, but it does not show an additional display in my display settings (Win 10). Second question is, can I set the aspect ratio? I have a device I want to stream to but it is a 1:1 aspect ratio, is there a way to change the AR of the virtual monitor to match?

Mike. I'm in a weird spot. Every time I turn off my displays the virtual display turns off also....then I turn my displays back on and all of the screens re-order themselves so basically needs to be setup again. Weird.

So once this is set up, if I point Sunshine to the Virtual Display, will it automatically use that "screen" for the gameplay source that's sent to my TV? Currently running an Ultrawide PC monitor and when I stream to the PC, it displays in a letterboxed image rather than taking up the entire 16:9 display.

Thanks for this! I'm facing a issue where all the refresh rates feel the same. I'm using this with Moonlight (240 Hz client display) and the refresh rate feels like 60 Hz even though I've selected 240 Hz. Anyone facing similar issues?

Thanks for the tutorial, it worked, however I'm still on square one regarding my objective. Im trying to stream to Moonlight my second "virtual" screen to my phone, so I can keep my 1st (real) screen running my normal software, while the 2nd has the game running. I can't figure how to do that yet... Any help would be awesome! Thanks

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!

okay i have a noob question, how i do now to remove the extra virtual monitor? :D

Hey, thank you very much for your effort! Are you planning on making a hdr version for Windows 10? If not, what is the reason why? Would love to know :)

sheesh I wish I knew about this sooner, much better than amyuni, persist after rebooting and a wide range of resolution

Great, thanks a lot. But for some reason, 120Hz is not in the list, only 60Hz... Any ideas what could be wrong?

I get all the way through, and then Display Settings insists my new virtual display 'isn't active', so I can't actually set a resolution. Any ideas?

Thanks, it works very fine. but When my pc is connected to the internet, it refuses to restart or boot. It shows a black screen. I would have to boot using safe mode then uninstall the driver before the pc boots again. Please help me out here.

Thanks!

Hello! Thanks for your good work! I have a question: how to remove the virtual display? I tried uninstalling via device management panel but after rebooting the PC, it keeps re-appearing.

Hello, is there a way to activate and deactivate it quickly with a script so that when I open sunshine from a remote location, the virtual screen appears and is disabled when I log out?

Hie @MikeTheTech i hope you are well . I tried to install the Virtual Display Driver on my Dell Laptop 3580 and i received an error. It says the following hardware was not installed. An error occured during the Installation of the device. Is there any way i can fix this? Please help. Any options can be help. Im stuck and i really need this. I will be so grateful if you assist coz i don't know what this error could be

You should not be using Display number or even full Display paths to reference displays. This will change between enabling, disabling, turning on/off, etc. Use Hardware ID instead that you can grab from Device Manager for each monitor.

Is there a way to get this to stop changing display ID's after each reboot?