Remote Desktop to Desktop questions

tyguitaxe001

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Dec 25, 2014
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Hey guys, sorry if this is in the wrong area but I wasn't sure where to put it. So I was wondering, if you use Remote Desktop to connect a laptop/tablet to a desktop, would you be using the hardware from the laptop, the desktop, or both? For example, if i wanted to play a game on my laptop that normally it can't run, would it work if I remote desktop-ed to my powerful desktop or would it still need the power from the laptop?
 
Solution
playing it in RDP plays it on the desktop. Think of the tablet or laptop as a remote control for the host.

But you can't game on RDP, frame rate is way to low. Use steams in house streaming feature to game stream.
On Windows, Remote Desktop is simply a "remote-control" type of connection; everything you do on the local machine is actually being performed on the remote host. Only screen updates (like the mouse moving and changes to the screen itself) along with any data transfers are sent back and forth.

That being the case, playing games remotely through Remote Desktop is generally a bad idea.

For one, you have the input lag of your controller inputs (keyboard & mouse) being sent to the remote host & vice versa. Most importantly, the screen updates will be nowhere near as fast as the screen updates on your local machine. While this may not matter as much for simple stuff, like a Flash game, it makes a huge difference when you have a graphically-intense game running at 1080p+resolution with tons of colors. Not only will it refresh slowly, you will have messed up colors as it tries to compress them, and everything will seem to lag as Remote Desktop tries to update your changing screen. All of this can even get worse if your Internet connection is slow as well.

So, end of the story, don't try to use Remote Desktop for anything graphically-intense. You're better off upgrading your local machine to something that can handle your game better, or perhaps just getting a new machine altogether.

Edit: Ninja'ed by the above. Ah well...