Fine-tuning the virtual display

Once a virtual monitor is part of a streaming or remote-work setup, the details start to matter. A cursor needs to behave properly, a refresh rate may need to match an existing display, and the advertised monitor information can affect what the next application decides to do.

The late 2024 changes added hardware-cursor work and a separate cursor toggle. They also introduced HDR+ controls and custom EDID support. EDID is the description a display gives the system about itself: identity, timings and other capabilities. Being able to supply that information gives advanced setups more control over what Windows sees.

Fractional refresh rates arrived in the October work too. That's useful when the target is something like 59.94 rather than a rounded 60. The configuration can describe the intended timing more precisely, although the complete capture and client path still needs to agree with it.

December's adapter logging added LUID information. That gives us a more specific identity to work with when multiple GPUs are present, which becomes useful again in the later PCI-based selection work.

I like these changes because they're connected to practical questions. Which GPU did we select? What timing are we advertising? Is the cursor part of the path behaving as expected? The driver becomes easier to understand when those choices are visible and configurable.

This is a source-history chapter. It describes when those controls were added, rather than asserting a new release or a successful end-to-end HDR test for every combination. The next useful step was making the settings and the surrounding tools easier to manage without asking everyone to edit the driver configuration by hand.