Lefteris Karafilis' Blog: What is this RemoteFX everybody is talking about?

It is actually an add-on for RDP that enables the delivery of a full Windows user experience to a range of client devices including rich clients, thin clients, and ultrathin clients. It delivers a rich user experience for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) by enabling host side rendering, GPU virtualization, Intelligent Screen Capture, Encoding, Decoding, and USB redirection.

RemoteFX enables host side rendering which allows graphics to be rendered on the host device instead of on the client which allows the applications to run at full speed by taking advantage of the GPU and CPU of host computer since all graphic types are rendered on the host computer, compressed as bitmap images and send to client computer.

RemoteFX is also capable of GPU virtualization by exposing a virtual graphic device to a virtual machine. Using a WDDM driver with the virtual desktop, allows multiple virtual desktops to share a single GPU on a Hyper-V server.

In order to take care of bandwidth limitations RemoteFX uses Intelligent Screen Capture, a technology which constantly detects network capability between client and host and adjusts frame-rate according to available bandwidth. Intelligent Screen Capture is designed to send more frames to ensure a good user experience.

RemoteFX encoder and decoder allows encoding on the processor, on the GPU, or on dedicated hardware on the host computer and decoding on the client.

Finally the USB redirection support allows many devices to be redirected to a Remote Desktop Virtualization Host server at the USB level. No device drivers are required on the client computer and universal interface is provided that works with any USB device on any platform where RemoteFX USB Redirection is supported. This solution redirects many types of devices, including audio devices, storage devices, human interface devices, all-in-one printers, and scanners.