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I have a Windows PC without a monitor that I would like to use for various purposes. I only have a MacBook Pro that I can use to control it via Microsoft's Remote Desktop. I have the Remote Desktop client installed on my MacBook Pro from the App Store and can access the computer.

I have a gigabit ethernet switch connected to my router. The switch is connected to both my MacBook Pro and my Windows PC via ethernet cables. The Windows PC doesn't have any WiFi connectivity.

Despite being connected via gigabit ethernet, I noticed rather high latency when controlling the Windows PC from my MacBook. When watching a video on the Windows PC, the frame rate stutters a lot and the network usage tops out at 20-30 Mbps, which is much below my expectation of 1000 Mbps.

After some searching, I noticed that the MacBook Pro was receiving the remote desktop video data via WiFi. I tried disabling WiFi to force it to use Ethernet, hoping that would speed it up, but it still caps out at the same speed.

Is there a way I can force Microsoft RDP to use Ethernet to give me better video frame rate and lower latency?

An example showing bandwidth topping out (but video is very stuttery):

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Remote desktop client preferences:

enter image description here

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  • Perhaps the bottleneck is the CPU. Could you check CPU usage on the host and client? If the videos are on the PC, using it as a DLNA server would give better performance (How to Turn Your Computer Into a DLNA Media Server). Jun 20, 2021 at 19:31
  • Does other services can use a higher transfer speed between both systems? I would run an iperf3 test between both just go see if your network really can transmit full gigabit speed.
    – Robert
    Jun 20, 2021 at 20:13
  • @AndrewMorton Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the issue. The CPU usage does increase but only to a maximum of around 10%. I can't see any bottlenecks other than a "ghost" bottleneck at the network level, and even then I seem to be able to transfer files just fine Jun 20, 2021 at 20:22
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    Generally speaking, you really shouldn't expect great video performance from RDP, and 30Mb/s is more or less standard for a RDP connection, regardless of what the screen is displaying. its likely that this is not a bandwidth issue at all, but more that you are expecting high performance video rendering from a general purpose renderer. the image stream RDP is processing isn't a x264/x265 stream your CPU/GPU has hardware acceleration for. also 550MB/s is impossible on Gigabit. maximum throughput on a gigabit link is a little more than 100MB/s. Jun 21, 2021 at 4:23
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    Video playback over RDP does not make use of either machines video playback hardware capabiities. There is nothing wrong here, its just the nature of the protocol. Do not use RDP for this purpose.
    – Silbee
    Jun 21, 2021 at 7:43

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