I haven been trying to understand the difference between VNC and RDP. My understanding is the VNC more or less just transmits a picture of the desktop. RDP however has more of a semantic understanding of what is happening on the desktop and transmits how to render certain types of windows, buttons, etc. (I don’t know how relevant this is unless people are using Windows Presentation Foundation or something similar though…)
So it seems that RDP is a much more efficient protocol.
However, my primary use case will be for monitoring a desktop that has Chrome browser full screen. In this case, will RDP be doing the same thing as VNC would and transmitting the contents of the Chrome browser?
I think you are mostly right that RDP handles vector graphics, while vnc is mainly screen image based.
Another difference is RDP informs clients when changes occur, while VNC server waits for clients to request the screen updates. This also makes RDP more efficient.
However, as users want more and more of the same experience as the remote computer, RDP nowadays seldom send vector graphics, i.e., RDP pretty much also send screen image diffs. The reason RDP is still faster is because Microsoft has built-in drivers inside Windows to detect display changes while VNC uses workaround to do that, you can imagine Microsoft does much better job in this. So even both protocols send the same image, Microsoft is much more efficient. As a matter of fact, no Windows remoting software is as efficient as RDP (I know Citrix’s ICA, let’s put it under same RDP category).
If you plan to remotely use Chrome for videos, you mway feel disappointed by RDP, as it’s slow unless you turn on RemoteFX, but it’s only available from Windows 2008 servers (I am not sure if Windows 8 supports it, though).
So my suggestion, use RDP whenever possible.