A virtual display for gaming, with room for agents and work.
staged
Give the game its own monitor.
I wanted a clean desk with one monitor, a fullscreen game, and a way to keep an eye on my agents and work. staged gives the game a virtual display and brings its picture into a window on the real screen. The space around it stays yours.
What it does
- Create a display. staged adds a virtual monitor. You choose its resolution and aspect ratio. The game sees a real display and runs fullscreen on it.
- Catch the picture. staged captures that display and shows it as a window on your physical screen, at whatever size you give it.
- Snap the rest. The remaining space becomes zones. Drop OBS, chat, Discord or a browser into them; they snap into place and stay there.
Why a monitor and not an upscaler
Upscalers take the finished frame and enlarge it. That is useful, and it is a different job: none of them can tell the game to render at a size your screen does not offer. A display can, because the game asks the display what it is.
Why not just windowed mode
A 1080p window works until it does not. The game is not fullscreen in it, the cursor can leave it, and the windows around it have no idea where it is. A virtual display gives the game what it expects and gives you the picture, to place where you like.
What this page does not claim
No frame-rate numbers here. Rendering fewer pixels costs less than rendering more; how much less depends on your game and your GPU, and you can read it off your own overlay.
On the drawing
- Creates a virtual display in a freely chosen resolution that the game treats as its own monitor.
- Captures that display and shows it as a window on the physical screen.
- The remaining screen area is divided into zones for agents, terminals, OBS, chat and Discord that windows snap into.
- Upscalers enlarge the finished frame; they cannot tell the game to render smaller. A virtual monitor can, because the game asks the display what it is.