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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T22:46:02+00:00

Supposing I was developing a fairly graphically intensive application (C++ or C#, graphics API

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Supposing I was developing a fairly graphically intensive application (C++ or C#, graphics API undecided) for which most of the usage will be by remote users over RDP (either terminal server sessions or remote access to a single-user machine). It’s obvious that non-essential “eye-candy” effects and animations should be avoided. My questions are:

  • What should I be careful to do/avoid doing to make most efficient use of the RDP protocol ? (e.g I have an idea RDP can remote some graphics drawing primitives straight to the client… but is that only for GDI ? Does using double-buffering break such remoting and force a bitmap mode ? Does the client-side bitmap cache “just work” or does it only cache certain things like fonts and icons ?)

  • Is there any sort of RDP protocol analyser available which will give some insight into what an RDP stream is actually transporting (in particular, bitmaps vs drawing primitives) ? (I can imagine adding some instrumentation to the rdesktop source to do this, but maybe something exists already).

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  1. Editorial Team

    In my experience I’d be careful when it comes to animations – especially fade up/down controls that can seriously kill performance over RDP.

    Double-buffering might also cause some problems, however I personally haven’t had to do too much in the way of workarounds for this – the article by Raymond Chen explains the possible pitfalls quite well.

    Essentially, it’s a good idea to check in code whether it’s running in a remote sessions (RDP, Citrix, etc). Take a look at: GetSystemMetrics( SM_REMOTESESSION ) – you can then decide at runtime whether to enable or disable certain features.

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