26.4. Performance

Performance with remote rendering depends primarily on two factors: rendering speed on the remote server machine and the available network bandwidth.

Rendering speed on the remote machine depends on the same things it would depend on if you were sitting at that machine, including CPU speed and graphics performance. In addition, it depends on whether rendering to an off-screen buffer can be accelerated (done in hardware) and whether there is enough accelerated off-screen buffer memory available.

Network bandwidth is usually the real limiting factor because RGB images are being transmitted and they can be quite large. For example, the image of a 640 by 480 window requires almost one million bytes of data (uncompressed). Here are some general guidelines for improving performance with remote rendering: