Does the colour quality of a VM affect it's performance?

Question

If you have a remote connection or a screenshare or whatever system where you're using a machine to look at another desktop on another machine, does the amount of colours affect the performance?

I'm not sure how Citrix VM vs Mikogo vs UltraVNC work with displaying information, but I've always guessed it's a combination of sending mouse and keyboard instructions and then refreshing the image to show what the display of the desktop is.

Now, if you have a .gif file with 265 colours, it's going to be smaller in filesize than one with 65million colours, because the palette is smaller, if I recall my image manipulation correctly.

Would a similar logic apply to remote connections? Would remoting into a machine and having 8-bit colours perform better than the same machine displaying 32 bit colour? alt text http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f5/Plum.jpg

Answer 1

that deppends on configuration, the VM can be running on 32bit colors, but if you configure the transmission to be done in 8bit, it'll be faster, you can configure it to disable the VM background when accessing it to make the performance even better