Remote Desktop/Terminal Services and the Highly Graphical Application – Tips and Reg Tweaks

Ask the Performance Team - Terminal Services and Graphically Intensive Applications

“Hello AskPerf, my name is Subheet Rastogi and I am a Technical Lead on the Performance team in Bangalore.  Today, we’re going to take a quick look at issues that typically arise when using graphic intensive applications or media streaming in a Remote Desktop Session.  Some common examples where you might encounter issues in an RDP session include Java applets embedded into web pages, Adobe Breeze, CAD-type programs and of course – playing games.  Why?  Because RDP was oroginally designed to flush the video frame buffer to the client about once every 100 milliseconds.  While this is fine for most Windows GDI applications, graphic intensive applications, 3D applications and applications requiring audio / video synchronization don’t fare so well.  With respect to streaming media in particular, RDP is only meant to cache the bitmap files (compressed) not the audio which is uncompressed over the wire.

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Regardless of whether or not you are using graphic intensive applications or streaming media across RDP, there are some things that you can do that may provide some performance benefits in your environment:

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A few cool tips, tricks and reg tweaks to help when doing Presentation Virtualization (i.e. Remote Desktop/Terminal Services) with a "graphically intensive” application.

Been doing RD for a while and I think the reg tweaks were news to me, so well worth a capture for future reference.