Does Win10 RDP graphics performance depend on local or remote GPU?

Question

I'm remoting in for data visualization work (mostly relies on WebGL). Local and remote are both Win10. Local is laptop w/ integrated Intel GPU and remote uses a GeForce 1030 GT. When I run the visualizations, I see GPU load and dedicated memory being used on both the remote and local PCs (local by the RDP process) through Process Hacker.

I'm wondering if upgrading the GPU is worth it on either the local or remote to get a better performance, as the current setup is pretty slow.

Solution 1

Since Windows 10 build 1511 and Windows Server 2016, RDP uses the AVC/H.264 codec in order to support larger screens than full HD. This codec uses the GPU, but only under certain conditions, but otherwise falls back to using the CPU as before.

If your conditions are such that video codec AVC/H.264 is used, then the GPU would be solicited on both sides, although encoding always requires more resources than decoding.

Reference :

• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 10 AVC/H.264 improvements in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

Solution 2

The graphics are initially rendered on the remote computer using its graphics card. The image of the screen is then transferred to your local computer where it is decoded an displayed. This uses a small amount of graphics processing but the image is just drawn from the data that came over the network (effectively like a video stream).

The performance will be limited by the remote graphics processing capacity and the network bandwidth. If the image is changing a lot and has high resolution, it may be network limited, regardless of how powerful the remote graphics card is.

Comments

[user1686]

That's not entirely true for recent RDP versions; they can use H.264 to transfer changing video, they automatically reduce image quality if bandwidth demands, and I think they can use client-side compositing for layering windows. (Come to think of it, IIRC all RDP versions have actually transported GDI render calls to the client (similar to X11)...)