How to install a virtual display on Windows 10/11 (up to 8K 240hz)

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

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.

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?

Fucking GOD you are a Fucking GOD

Monitor 1: Intel(R) UHD
Monitor 2: NVIDIA GeForce (Main Display)
Monitor 3: Virtual Display

When I try to check with the program dxgi-info.exe
The virtual display (monitor 3) run onboard graphic
Is there a way to install a virtual display to connect to graphic cards?

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.

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!

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?

Ah this is for windows goddamnit

hey i wanted to use the virtual display so i can set the res in games higher than my monitors native res so i can make screenrecordings in 4k on my 1080p monitor. but the problem is that the games only recognises the 1080p monitor. does anyone know how i can let the game think im playing on the virutal display?

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.

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!

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

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

This would be cool if I could get it to work. I set everything up as per the instructions but using a Steam Deck and Moonlight to connect to my gaming PC with the virtual monitor and Sunshine set up to use it, I get a no video from host error every time. Sunshine cannot find the virtual monitor.

If anyone has experience specific to Windows Server 2019, I've been trying to enable anydesk for my headless vm (ws 2019). and these drivers install and get enabled/started perfectly with no error but once RDP disconnects no displays are in work. Screen just goes blank. any workaround? these VMs are cloud based.

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?

Thanks for the tutorial !
is it possible to set this up with moonshine on my pc and the steam Deck oled , while the pc monitor is turned off?

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.

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!

Set this up and it works but unless I do 1920 x 1080 I only get 60hz as an option for refresh rate on the virtual monitor.

To add in case anyone runs into the same issue as I did on Windows 10:
The Driver released in december did not work for me (23.12.2 HDR) so I used the previous one (23.10.20.2).
One issue I have is that it does not show up as an audio device, is this a known issue that has a fix?
Regardless, this has been a godsend. Thank you for the concise and simple guide, goodbye dummy plug I bought nearly a decade ago.
And thank you to anyone who helped/originally developed this and is reading this.

Edit: Fixed my first issue by selecting the previous version.

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

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

This issue is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen yet. The pc can’t see the headset as a monitor so you have to monkey around 😢

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?

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.

You are my hero, now this is my final solution for connecting to my home server without a graphics card via Rustdesk!!! Very well done have a great day sir!

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?

I am getting a code 31. Any fix for this? Great video and thanks!

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

thanks your script just fucked up my screen

120hz isn't showing?

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.

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!

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!

There will be serious performance problems using moonlight, the highest is only 40~50fps

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!

I see a lot more resolution options than this, but also when I set it to 4k or 8k I only see 60hz as a refresh rate option, any suggestions?
ETA: If I change the resolution to 1080p, I see all the way up to 480hz as a refresh rate option, but not on 1440p, 4k or 8k

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!

Ehm sorry, how to unistall them? 🤣 I'm tryng with the device manager but after unistalling, the virtual display keeps recreating itself

After installing the driver, I checked the Virual Display Driver by MTT properties and I get this: This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)

The ALPC message requested is no longer available.

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.

Mike any updates on HDR? Keep up the great work

Hi! i saw there was a 8K HDR file, is there support for this yet?

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.

I can change to 4K but then only 60Hz is available. What do I do wrong?

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 !

Love you brother❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

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.