Unity 5 Free and Remote Desktop window rendering issues

Hi All

I am having trouble using Unity 5 "free" across a remote desktop connection. For reasons I don't want to bore you with I do not physically have access to my main development machine for periods of time but I have an old laptop that I can remote into my main machine with and remote desktop runs fine for all other applications, even graphics intensive ones like Photoshop.

The issue I am having is that most of the time Remote desktop is not rendering the contents of the Unity editor window. The window border shows up and the menus at the top (I can also expand the menus), but the entire window contents show whatever is on the desktop or other applications behind the Unity window. I can size the window and minimize / maximise, just no content. The strange thing is that occasionally it works absolutely fine, so I know it isn't a fundamental incompatibility. Sometimes it will start off working fine, and then the issue will occur spontaneously after a period of time. There does not seem to be a pattern to this and it's driving me nuts.

I have done loads of research, (and there are some low level registry switches that "Seem" to do things like disabling hardware rendering in remote desktop) but nothing has worked for me.

Both machines are Windows 7 Enterprise.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

Many thanks in advance
Sauerkraut.

 

I seem to have made a breakthrough, but final outcome is not confirmed, as it has only been working for about 30mins. Starting unity.exe with the -force-d3d9 command line parameter seems to have helped. It appears that the intermittent issue could have been caused by the fact that unity was switching between DX9 and DX11, and works in one but not the other hardware mode. I'll post again if this is confirmed.

 

In case this helps anyone else - I can now confirm that the downgrade to DX9 has worked for a whole day without re-occurrence, s I am convinced this is the solution.