FEATHER
WALL

Most tools park a borderless window behind your icons. FeatherWall inserts a real visual into the desktop's own composition tree, so icons, right-click and window order keep working.

24H2 changed the rules

Windows 11 24H2 put the desktop out of reach of the old WorkerW trick, which is why many wallpaper tools now render black. FeatherWall detects the topology and handles both.

One process, no shell

Direct3D 11 and DirectComposition, called from C# through Vortice. There is no Chromium, no Electron and no separate launcher sitting in the background.

It gets out of the way

Playback stops rather than throttles for fullscreen apps, the lock screen, remote sessions and battery saver. A game never competes with your wallpaper for the GPU.

From scripts/bench/Run-Bench.ps1, which refuses to report a row whose pause state changed mid-sample — a silently paused wallpaper is the easiest flattering lie. Pick a state.

It all lands on the integrated GPU. nvidia-smi shows nothing on the RTX 5090. The compositor lives on whichever adapter drives your display, so it never competes with a game.

GPU percentages are per engine and do not sum, so the table shows the busiest. Graphics memory is separate from the working set. Paused holds the most — buffers are kept so resuming is instant.

Two corrections. This page said dedicated VRAM reads 0 MB; Windows actually attributes 232 MB. It published 0.004% paused CPU; the harness measures 0.034%. Both go against us.

1080p60 has never been measured — the dashes mean nobody ran it, not zero. CPU moves two- to threefold between runs, so treat any figure as one sample.

What the widgets cost. Still image: 0.026% → 0.135% CPU — five times baseline, and that is the record's frame clock. Turn off spin to get it back. 4K60: 0.721% → 0.988%, GPU unchanged.

Any typeface you own, at nine positions, previewed live in the panel. Beside it a battery halo and a record carrying the real album artwork.

The record is the only thing on a frame clock, and it stops dead when the desktop is covered, the display sleeps or the music does. Everything else repaints only on a Windows event.

Red to 20%, orange to 50%, green above. A bolt while charging, a tick at full. Thresholds, colours, size and corner are all yours.

Four states drawn by the real renderer and composited — a laptop is only ever in one. Everything else here is a live capture.

Releases are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you the first time. Verify the archive against the published hash, or skip the binary entirely and build it yourself.

winget install FeatherWall does not work yet. The only submission is v0.1.0 — validated, and queued for a community moderator at microsoft/winget-pkgs#417753 since 15 Aug. v0.2.0 has not been submitted.

Built by one person on one monitor. Several code paths are unit-tested but have never run on real hardware. Every issue below is open and labelled.