This is how Windows Remote Desktop used to work - it would forward GDI instructions to be rendered remotely.
It falls apart as UIs got richer, browsers in particular: they're entirely composited in-app and not via GDI, because GDI isn't an expressive enough interface. So you end up shipping a lot of bitmaps, and to optimize you need to compress them. You might as well compress the whole screen then.
I wonder how this works exactly. RDP lets me connect to a single monitor Win 11 host and display it on my client's three monitors. Everything is super smooth including browsers (I am connecting via Ethernet). Is the host managing the three screens or does the RDC do it on the client's side?
Note the "used to work" modern RDP will negotiate some form of image (or video) based compression for transferring data[1]. You can even share an X11 desktop over RDP using freerdp-shadow-cli.
It falls apart as UIs got richer, browsers in particular: they're entirely composited in-app and not via GDI, because GDI isn't an expressive enough interface. So you end up shipping a lot of bitmaps, and to optimize you need to compress them. You might as well compress the whole screen then.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/3972/nvidia-gtc-2010-wrapup/3