# A monitor without another panel on the desk

> The early Virtual Display Driver work on modes, refresh rates and setup.

Canonical page: https://pyrosoft.pro/blog/a-monitor-without-another-panel-on-the-desk

Live development journal; no publication date.
Work period: 2023-10-14 to 2023-10-21
Updated: 2026-10-20

A virtual display gives Windows another monitor without plugging in another panel. That's useful for remote access, streaming and headless computers, where an application may need a real desktop surface even though nobody is sitting in front of a physical screen.

The project builds on the Indirect Display Driver sample lineage. The retained Git history goes back further than my product work, so those inherited commits belong to that foundation and its contributors. The October 2023 changes are where this chapter of the Virtual Display Driver story starts.

Refresh rates were an early focus. The October 14 history shows additional modes being introduced, narrowed and adjusted again, followed by more refresh-rate work over the next week. There were also widescreen modes and a 2732 by 2048 option, giving the virtual screen dimensions that could better match different client devices.

That back-and-forth is useful context. A refresh rate appearing in one commit doesn't mean it remained the final supported setting. The early work was finding a configuration Windows and the driver could handle consistently, rather than treating the longest mode list as the best result.

Installer and alternate-driver experiments were also present, with some explicitly marked incomplete. I'm keeping those descriptions attached to their stage of development. Adding source for an installer isn't the same milestone as verifying a finished installation on someone's machine.

The basic use case was already strong: create a desktop Windows can render, then let your capture or remote-access application use it. The later HDR, configuration and control-panel work grew out of making that virtual monitor more useful in real setups.