Creating a display instance WITHOUT a monitor or a dummy plug

ASTRAL_LTT · January 10, 2022

If in case you need a new display instance for your project or setup but you don't have a dummy plug or your graphics card does not have an output port, this might be for you.

What you need to do:

Simply download and install ge9's IddSampleDriver (read the instructions included there).
Go to Device Manager and Display Settings to check if the driver is working properly.

How it works:

Microsoft recently introduced the concept of Indirect Display Driver (IDD). This is basically just an implementation of that. In essence, it creates a display instance without requiring a physical connection to the graphics card.

ge9's IddSampleDriver is a fork of roshkins's IddSampleDriver which adds a config file that you could use to set the amount of display instances as well as the available properties for those displays.

Things to note:

This requires fairly advanced computer skills according to the driver's author. Moreover, this is a custom driver from a pretty much unknown source. Proceed at your own risk. With that said, I would also like to give my opinion that simply being diligent in reading the instructions and having basic knowledge in what drivers and certificates are is enough to make this work.

Also, if the certificate was not installed properly, try opening either Command Prompt or Powershell as administrator, navigate to installCert.bat's directory and open it from there.

As mentioned before, you could use this for a variety of cases. A comment on a Reddit post that I made even stated that they got their Tesla M40 (a card without a display output port) to produce a display output using this.

Credits:

roshkins for their driver
ge9 for their convenient fork

I also posted this on Reddit and LTT Discord for those who are interested.

I'm trying to make this reach as many people as I can so that Google could place this method on the first page of search results since I had a hard time finding this on my own.