Which graphics card is used when working with OpenGL shaders over RDP?

Question

I\'m taking an introductory OpenGL development course with a Surface Pro, and was hoping to connect to my more powerful desktop for development through the native Windows re

Answer 1

That depends on your remote system's configuration. Your usual consumer GPU with standard drivers will not provide any HW acceleration for the RDP whatsoever and you'll drop into a SW emulation mode. However there are special visualization server GPUs and drivers which hook into the RDP server implementation and provide GPU acceleration for it; very likely you don't have that though.

Note that it's ultimately just a driver issue. With the right drivers every GPU could do that. But HW vendors want to sell their special purpose devices, so they're locking that functionality to a specific product line.

I'm hoping, that the advances of the Linux open source graphics ecosystem will, as a sideshow, enable implementing such visualization servers with commodity hardware in the near future. As much as I disregard the Wayland protocol and condept, as much do I like the advances its development promotes toward the lower levels of the Linux graphics stack. Which may likely put some pressure on the Windows world to catch up with that.