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I sometimes use my Windows 7 server box (running Windows 7 Enterprise, 64-bit) for development. Space on my desk is limited however so I like to use Remote Desktop to remote into it from my main machine (Windows XP 32-bit).

I have an ATI Radeon HD 5450 video card with drivers correctly installed. When doing anything that requires proper video card drivers (such as initializing OpenGL or DirectX) it all works fine when logged in directly on the Windows 7 machine.

When I remote into the Windows 7 machine from my XP machine however, Windows 7 uses "RDPDD Chained DD" as its video card display driver and the ATI Drivers fail to load (or if they were loaded, crash). This means all applications that need to initialize OpenGL or DirectX fail to do so.

Is there a way around this?

Note: My XP machine has an ATI Radeon HD 4800 video card, if that makes a difference.

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Remote Desktop will not allow this. In Server 2008 R2 SP1, there is a new feature called RemoteFX which can allow some rendering through a remote desktop connection, but the server is required for this feature to work. I would recommend that you keep the server's monitor where you can see it well and use 'Mouse without Borders' to access the server machine from the same keyboard and mouse that you use on your main workstation. You can even drag and drop files between computers. Best of all, it's free!

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  • Thanks for this. I will have to try with Mouse without Borders project - at first glance it looks neat but I'm not sure how usable it would be.
    – user116507
    Feb 2, 2012 at 20:19

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