RDP screen draw really slow on MAC version

Hi Bryan,

The difference between 64 bits and 32 bits doesn't apply on the Mac version.
There 2 places where you can change various setting to improve the performance:
-In the Advanced tab setting both Sandboxing and Open GL to true will make RDP session drawing code to use Open GL (which should be fatser).

-In the experience tab many of the settings there influence the performance.


Tell me if this helped you

Hello Benoit,

We have several folks using the Mac version of RDM to RDP into remote Windows 10 virtual machines. This video performance problem was brought to my attention recently, and I was going to create a new forum post about it, but then discovered this one, so I'll just latch on to it.

I tried the suggestion of setting the Sandboxing and OpenGL settings to True, and while that does seem to help a little, the video performance is still far from acceptable. Changing the RDP "engine" and color-depth settings in the RDM connection entry also doesn’t help. What does help, is to change the "display" option for the RDM connection entry to "external," as that makes the connection open with the Microsoft RDP client. With the Microsoft RDP client, high resolutions and 32-bit color can be used, and the video performance is very good.

I've also tested connecting to physical Win10 PCs, both local and remote, and the video problem exists with those as well, so the issue seems to have nothing to do with virtualization or network latency, and everything to do with video rendering by whatever "engine" RDM for Mac is using.

Is it possible for the Mac version of RDM to "integrate" with Microsoft's RDP in the OS, like the Windows version of RDM does? Then "embedded" and "undocked" connections in RDM should be just as good as with the "external" Microsoft Remote Desktop client.

For the record, I LOVE Remote Desktop Manager (and primarily use the Windows version, which doesn't have this issue), and would LOVE to see the Mac client be just as great.

Many thanks for your help!

Jim

P.S. If it would be helpful to post a video demonstrating the performance differences between RDM for Mac, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop app, I'm happy to do that!

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your detailed post about your situation.
On the Windows version we use a control to display the RDP session made by Microsoft.
Unfortunately, on the Mac version this control is not available.
We instead rely on freeRDP an open source implementation of the RDP protocol.
I will show your post to our in house specialist of freeRDP and see if we can manage to bring ourselves closer to the MRD performance.

Best Regards,

Thank you Benoit, good to know, and it never hurts to ask!

One more thing you could try.
There is a new option in the advanced preferences.
Check it and restart the app.
It has helped a few users with general performance issues.

Thanks Benoit,

I tried enabling that and restarted RDM, but sadly it didn't seem to help much. As one of my colleagues put it, the "dot-matrix-printer-screen-draw" is still there.

Thanks for digging in!

Jim

Thanks for trying.

We'll keep you posted about our progress.

Hello!

I hadn't used RDM for Mac for a while, but after updating to version 3.5.3.0 today, Windows 10 sessions are fast now!

You must have made some improvements?

Hi,

We added support to more codecs which improve greatly session on Windows 10 computers.

Glad you enjoyed!

I will say I have the same problem. I have tried all of the suggestions in this thread and the performance is bad enough that I use the Microsoft RDP client on my mac. I love the product on my windows machine but on the OS X side it's a struggle. Specifically I do quite a bit of work form the command line when i'm RDPed to a machine. I will type into my cmd window in the RDP session and it will draw the characters quite slowly if at all. Sometimes I need to move around my cmd window get it to refresh and show what I have typed.

I am running v. 3.5.3.0 of Remote Desktop Manager

Hello stchizen,


Could you try RDM Mac 3.5.4.2.

You can download it here - http://mac.remotedesktopmanager.com/Home/Download

Best regards,

O wow, with 3.5.4.2 it is running much better. Curious that when I did "check version" while running 3.5.3.0 it didn't find the new version but it was obviously available on the website.

I've been trying 3.5.4.2 this morning, and like previous 3.5.x the screen draw is dramatically improved over prior versions.

I find the Mac version just fine for managing servers of any Windows version. The most "taxing" seems to be Windows 10, and I find that experience to be inferior to the Microsoft client (not with video performance per se, but more that clicking and interactions are not as precise).

For Mac people in our organization that "live" in Windows 10 machines for part of their job, they use the Microsoft client, but then use RDM for "everything else" (including running the Windows version of RDM inside that remote Windows 10 machine).

@stchizen Unfortunately, that is caused by our file distribution system. It may take up to 24h before a new version is detected by the app. Normally this is not an issue and that's why we try to notify our users when they are waiting for a fix.

@JimHarle Thanks for reporting this we'll see what we can do about this.