Fast VNC from Windows to Mac?

Question

I regularly need to connect from a Windows box to an OSX box over VNC.

OSX has VNC built-in as part of its "Screen Sharing" tool, but for some reason, it's much faster to connect from OSX to OSX or from OSX to Windows than it is to connect from Windows to OSX. (I use UltraVNC on Windows.) Windows to OSX connectivity is almost unusably slow, even when the two boxes are sitting right next to each other, plugged into the same router.

How can I improve performance in this case? Should I explore alternate Windows clients? Alternate OSX VNC servers? Should I use some other screen-sharing tool instead of VNC? (If so, what?)

(Note that this question is more specific than other more general questions.)

Solution 1

OS X Leopard with its own ScreenSharing client, connecting to another OS X native screen sharing server, does some negotiation on colour depth, etc., so it's transferring less data.

(You can see this effect exaggerated if you connect to an OS X system from Windows using the RealVNC client over a higher latency connection. It will take a long time to build up the screen output.)

I couldn't find a way to make RealVNC request a lower colour depth so what I did, to work around this, was run a copy of VineServer on OS X with the '-maxdepth 8' option (and '-rfbport 5901' to run it as an alternate server), and connect to that when I connect long distance (which I always do through an SSH tunnel, before anyone states the obvious.)

Solution 2

I've switched from UltraVNC (back) to RealVNC, primarily because UltraVNC was not handling my multi-monitor server right.

Solution 3

I found switching to Vine Server rather than the default Apple one made a huge difference to performance.

Comments

[Winter Dragoness]

This is a duplicate of superuser.com/questions/164576/… There are more answers over there.

[Admin]

vnc-4_1_2-x86_win32_viewer.exe 10.12.200.31 FullColour=true is slower, but works well for me

[Adam Lindberg]

I also switched to RealVNC as it provided the best speed. I'm now running 1080p over a 100 Mbit network without problems. OSXVnc was too slow, as was Apple Screen Sharing.

[thomthom]

Did you use RealVNC on both client and server side?

[Joseph Lennox]

Do note the price of those products went from $0 to $750

[Admin]

Does AnyDesk require to install an AnyDesk server on the Mac? I have tried to connect AnyDesk Windows to the Mac VNC server, but it doesn't work.

[Admin]

Their website is strangely lacking in information about it. You could contact their Sales or Support.

[Admin]

NoMachine worked excellently for me! Thank you.