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Turbo or Tiger?

The TigerVNC Project was founded by some of the former TightVNC developers and The VirtualGL Project in early 2009, and it aims to provide a high-performance VNC solution based on the RealVNC 4 and X.org code bases. Unlike TurboVNC, TigerVNC is not specifically designed for 3D and video applications, and thus TurboVNC remains our X proxy of choice. However, The TigerVNC Project has served as an incubator for next-generation VNC technologies, so TigerVNC offers some bells and whistles that the more established TurboVNC solution currently lacks. We encourage VirtualGL "power users" to give TigerVNC a test drive. The following summarizes the strengths of both solutions:

TurboVNC

• Very stable -- 7 years of enterprise testing and productization, and thousands of seats in corporations and academia
• The ability to set global security/authentication policies for a particular server machine
• One-time password support
• Lossless refresh and automatic lossless refresh features
• Rich Windows VNC viewer GUI
• Full documentation
• Multi-threaded encoding (multi-threaded decoding slated for next major release)
• Lossless Tight encoding option for high-speed networks (performs better than Hextile and uses less bandwidth than Raw)
• Full support for full-screen and multi-screen configurations on Linux and Windows clients
• Default settings are designed to provide peak LAN performance for 3D and video apps

TigerVNC

• Support for a wide variety of X11 extensions, including RENDER and X Input (support for additional X extensions is slated for the next major release of TurboVNC)
• Automatic flow control for high-latency networks (support for this is slated for the next major release of TurboVNC)
• FLTK-based VNC viewer-- provides native (non-X11) VNC viewer on Mac and a rich VNC viewer GUI on Linux
• Built-in encryption and advanced authentication via VeNCrypt
• Rich Java VNC viewer GUI

The latest version of TigerVNC as of this writing (1.2) can be configured to provide similar performance to the most common modes of operation in TurboVNC (assuming that multi-threading is not being used in the latter.) The following table lists equivalent settings between the two solutions: