It seems nobody has managed to invent a really good protocol yet though, one that combines high compression ratios of advanced video codecs, use of UDP with a good way to deal with lost packets, perceptive coding that detects and favours readability of text over 'useless' details, good automated balancing of update/transmission speeds with quality and encode speeds, gradual and smooth quality refinement over time for non-updated areas, client side caching and differencing (while video coding can reference past frames they are not really quite a good match to normal desktop content, and the fact that you could easily store 100s of MB of reference data client side). Particularly on slow connections that makes VNC unusable since any big change on the screen means you'll not see any changes until minutes later. TCP based protocols are quite vulnerable to for example high packet loss, and the fact that once you sent some data, it has to be transmitted - thus a single large update means your screen will hang until it arrived. The mentioned xpra comes somewhat close to it, but honestly it still does a crappy job.Īnother issue is TCP vs.

A good system would be able to smoothly sacrifice quality to keep a reasonable rate of updates. The only lossy compression supported by TeamViewer seems to be reducing the colour depth and some kind of interlaced updates which help little with animated content as you noted. I'd like to emphasize the fact that VNC is simply a horrible comparison point.īetween Linux systems, a properly configured xpra provides much, much better performance - mostly thanks to supporting H.264 based lossy compression.

Anydesk vs teamviewer performance