We intend to remove the NoMachine Mirror Driver

[graywolf]

Since the earliest versions of NoMachine for Windows we shipped a mirror driver which is “a virtual device that mirrors the drawing operations of one or more additional physical display devices“.

Given that:
1. Mirror drivers don’t work in Windows 8 and later (same document above: “Starting with Windows 8, mirror drivers will not install on the system”
2. In Windows 7 and Vista a mirror driver would disable Aero
3. Synchronizing with Aero using Direct3D, NoMachine achieves optimal performance without the need of a mirror driver
4. Mirror driver often stop working on headless systems (where “physical display devices” are turned off)

we mean to remove the mirror driver from NoMachine.

We don’t foresee any impact on performance (based on the above statements).

Windows XP is the only case that could leverage the mirror driver to get better performance but we prefer to remove it anyway, as the reliability issues (see point 4 above, for example) exceed the benefits.

What does everybody think?

[fermulator]

What replaces the functionality?

[graywolf]

fermulator, we don’t mean to replace the mirror driver with anything, it’ll be just removed.

Could you detail the question? Which functionality are you referring to?

[fermulator]

It’s probably worthwhile to document the backwards compatibility which would be lost in doing so. As far as I can interpret from the original post, only Windows XP would be negatively affected (in which case no one probably cares).

My question directly was more out of interest — wondering — what driver replaces the functionality in Win7+ (w.r.t. “a virtual device that mirrors the drawing operations of one or more additional physical display devices“.)

[graywolf]

Thanks to the continuous improvement we have being introducing into the software since the release of version 4 we don’t expect any loss in performance – compared to what you could get using a mirror driver – even with the few Windows operating systems that might still use it.

[brucekenway]

Despite of many improvements, Windows XP still be negatively affected.

[graywolf]

Assuming that Windows XP could be affected, the cons would overweigh the pros anyway: see point 4 above.

[Author]

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