Only RDP has felt truly responsive to me, and my understanding is that it cheats by not sending raster graphics and instead drawing primaries directly on the remote system and then updating the state based on the server?
The RDP specifications are partially documented by MS, and even the publicly available parts are huge.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
The main issue I think is that my poor M2 Air cannot run iOS simulators and Sunshine simultaneously without thermal throttling because of the video streaming aspect. It did feel somewhat reasonably responsive on a LAN, but I can’t say over more unreliable networks.
As far as the latency on MeowDisplay, In my testing on Wifi, I measured around 14-17ms median from capture to receiver handoff, not e2e. I've also seen occasional spikes around 50-90ms and some stalled frames, you do notice the stalls but overall it's pretty responsive.
I've preferred to show the cursor as it is on the mac instead of rendering it locally on the phone which may make it feel smoother but the trade-off is that it may not accurately represent where the cursor actually is on the mac if things lag or hang.
Then again, it does depend on the connection.
Every time I use it I'm reminded of how good RDP is/was.
Immediate reservation about Parsec is that it requires internet access to its cloud services for authentication, session discovery, and connection setup. For me, that immediately sucks, but I'm still going to give it a go to see how low latency it is.
I have used Sunshine/Moonlight for gaming in the past and it was fantastic, but for whatever reason it was janky to use for remote desktop.