What is liquiddx11?

liquidDX11 is a Windows C++ demo project that creates a floating, frosted-glass overlay on your desktop using Direct3D 11, the graphics technology built into Windows. The overlay captures whatever is on your screen in real time, applies a blurring effect to that captured image on the GPU, then renders a translucent glass panel on top, complete with light refraction, color fringing, edge highlights, and rounded corners. The result looks like the frosted-glass panels seen in modern operating system interfaces, but running as a standalone overlay on any part of your screen. The project uses DXGI Desktop Duplication, a Windows API that grabs live frames of the desktop directly from the graphics driver. A blur technique called Dual Kawase processes each captured frame on the GPU before it is sampled by custom shader code. The UI elements drawn on top animate with spring physics, giving panels a slight bounce when they open, close, or move. All the interactive controls are built on Dear ImGui, a popular C++ library for building debug and tool interfaces. The project adds a custom widget kit on top of that, along with a command palette (Ctrl+K), a demo gallery showing different glass surface styles, and persistent settings saved to a config file. An optional screen recording feature triggered with F9 outputs an MP4 file if ffmpeg is available on the system. Building requires Visual Studio 2022 on Windows with a 64-bit target. The repository includes a solution file for Visual Studio, a CMake setup, and build scripts for Git Bash. This is a source release rather than a ready-to-install application or reusable library, so some familiarity with C++ builds on Windows is expected. The original project code is MIT licensed. Third-party libraries bundled with it, including Dear ImGui and FreeType, carry their own separate license terms. Desktop Duplication may not work in remote desktop sessions or on unusual GPU configurations, and the project supports Windows only.