I display a 2D texture in OpenGL using Qt. Unfortunately I have found out that I need to support running my application via Remote Desktop to a Windows 7 PC. In this case I need to use OpenGL ES 2.0 API (ANGLE). Due to low bandwidth my 2D visualization seems to be lagging.
My texture may have higher resolution than the screen so that it needs to be minified. When not using remote desktop my approach have been to specify a very detailed texture and let the graphics card do the minification.
However now I am thinking that the OpenGL calls are executed in software locally and not on the remote machine? In which case the textures have to be transmitted via TCP/IP?
Does this mean that I should do minification myself before using the textures? As an example instead of using a 2048x2048 texture I may bin 2x2 pixels in C++ and upload a 1024x1024 texture.
Alternatively I could use glGenerateMipmap?
I feel multiple terms are confused here: RDP just transfers the entire remote desktop for you whatever is on it, so no "OpenGL calls are executed in software locally". Hence, unfortunately it will not help if you reduce the texture size in your app, even if you remove it entirely (try it). RDP is not really suitable for real time animation.
Your app better be running locally on the user machine, so better to think how to distribute your OGL app to users. If you cannot install your app on users machine, or give them installation kit, then maybe turning your app to a browser app is a better option.
WebGL there for exactly this kind of applications, and is a standard too: https://www.khronos.org/webgl/