Games Like Staged

Your game in focus. Your apps in reach.

A fullscreen game wants your whole screen. Click anything else and it minimizes, flickers, or kicks you out of the fight. Meanwhile chat has a question, your AI coding agent is waiting for approval, and your team just pinged you.

Staged gives your game its own virtual monitor and shows it in a movable window on your real screen. Put chat, OBS, your terminal and Discord around it. One monitor, an ultrawide or a big OLED TV: everything stays on one display, nothing minimizing.

What it does

Peek & Hide

Need your desktop? Hold the peek key and it's right there: read chat, check your agent, let go and you're straight back in the game. Need to answer? Click, reply, approve. One press and you're locked back in. No alt-tab. No minimize.

Someone walks in? One press and the game is gone, still running on its own monitor. Press again and you're back. Every key is rebindable.

Performance

Because your game renders at the resolution you choose, your GPU has fewer pixels to push: 44% fewer on a 1440p monitor, 75% fewer on 4K. Instead of costing you frames, Staged gives you frames back.

Benchmark: same GPU-bound synthetic benchmark scene on the same PC, native 1440p fullscreen vs. a 1080p stage, 72 to 144 fps. It is a test scene, not a game. Your gain depends on the game and how GPU-bound it is.

Who it's for

Installation & compatibility

Staged creates the virtual monitor with a bundled open-source virtual display driver (IddCx, MIT-licensed). Installing it requires administrator privileges once, during setup. Uninstalling Staged removes the driver.

Windows 11 version 24H2 or later (64-bit). Single-monitor, multi-monitor, ultrawide and OLED setups supported.

Clean by design

Staged works entirely on the display side. No game hooks, no injection, nothing inside the game process. No phone-home, no usage analytics.