Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

Visual display policy settings

The Visual Display section includes policy settings for controlling the quality of images that are sent from virtual desktops to the user device.

Preferred color depth for simple graphics

This policy setting is available in VDA versions 7.6 FP3 and later. The 8-bit option is available in VDA versions 7.12 and later.

This setting makes it possible to lower the color depth at which simple graphics are sent over the network. Lowering to 8-bit or 16-bit per pixel potentially improves responsiveness over low bandwidth connections. However, this action might cost slight degradation in image quality. The 8-bit color depth is not supported when the Use video codec for compression policy setting is set to For the entire screen.

The default preferred color depth is 24-bits per pixel.

VDAs fall back to 24-bit (default) color depth if the 8-bit setting is applied on VDA version 7.11 and earlier.

Target frame rate

This setting specifies the maximum number of frames per second sent from the virtual desktop to the user device.

By default, the maximum is 30 frames per second.

Setting a high number of frames per second (for example, 30) improves the user experience, but requires more bandwidth. Decreasing the number of frames per second (for example, 10) maximizes server scalability at the expense of user experience. For user devices with slower CPUs, specify a lower value to improve the user experience.

The maximum supported frame rate per second is 60.

Visual quality

This setting specifies the desired visual quality for images displayed on the user device.

By default, this setting is Medium.

To specify the quality of images, choose one of the following options:

  • Low - Recommended for bandwidth-constrained networks where visual quality can be sacrificed for interactivity
  • Medium - Offers the best performance and bandwidth efficiency in most use cases
  • High - Recommended if you require visually lossless image quality
  • Build to lossless - Sends lossy images to the user device during periods of high network activity and lossless images after network activity reduces. This setting improves performance over bandwidth-constrained network connections
  • Always lossless - When preserving image data is vital, select Always lossless to ensure that lossy data is never sent to the user device. For example, when displaying X-ray images where no loss of quality is acceptable.
Visual display policy settings