This article is written for IT and help desk staff. It covers a specific class of performance complaint: an Apporto session where typed characters appear on screen seconds after they are typed, and the mouse feels similarly delayed, even though the network connection is good. The cause is on the user's computer, not in the network or the Apporto service, and it can be confirmed in about five minutes.

A short end-user version of this article is available here: Typing or Mouse Lag? Try Turning Off Video Compression.

How to recognize this issue

The signature is a severe, sustained input delay combined with connection metrics that look healthy:

• Typed characters appear 2–4 seconds after the keystroke; mouse movement and clicks feel equally delayed. The session is otherwise connected and stable.
• The network indicator in the Apporto menu bar shows a good connection, and network latency tests come back normal. Other users at the same site are unaffected.
• Reconnecting or relaunching the session does not help. Affected users often relaunch repeatedly out of frustration with no improvement.

Healthy connection metrics alongside seconds of perceived lag is itself the tell: the delay is being added after the image data reaches the browser, while the browser turns it into pixels.

Two checks that settle it

1. Turn off Video Compression

In the Apporto session, turn off the Video Compression setting (this is the H.264 video setting). Turning it off restarts the session connection.

If the session becomes responsive immediately, the problem is confirmed to be in the video decoding path on the user's computer. Note that the improvement comes from compression being off, not from the reconnect the toggle performs; reconnecting on its own does not fix this issue.

2. Check chrome://gpu on the affected computer

In the browser used for Apporto, open chrome://gpu (Chrome) or edge://gpu (Edge) and look at the Graphics Feature Status list at the top.

On a healthy machine, Video Decode and WebGL read "Hardware accelerated". On an affected machine they read "Software only", often along with Compositing, Rasterization, and Canvas. Further down, the GPU0 entry will name a software renderer instead of a real graphics adapter. The strings to look for:

• Microsoft Basic Render Driver — Windows is running its fallback adapter because no vendor GPU driver is loaded.
• WARP or SwANGLE — the browser is rasterizing in software.
• SwiftShader — the equivalent software fallback, most often seen on macOS.

Any of these confirms the machine has no working GPU acceleration.

Why this causes seconds of lag

With Video Compression on, the Apporto desktop is streamed as H.264 video. Nearly all modern computers decode and display that video using dedicated hardware in the graphics adapter, which is why the setting normally improves the experience. When the machine has no working GPU acceleration, the browser must instead decode every frame on the CPU, draw it through a software renderer, and composite the page in software as well. At full desktop resolution the CPU cannot keep up, frames queue, and the time from keystroke to on-screen character stretches into seconds even though the network round trip is unchanged.

With Video Compression off, the desktop is sent as ordinary image updates the browser can draw without video decoding. Software rendering handles that comfortably for documents, coding, and general office work, which is why the session recovers immediately.

Fixing the endpoint

On Windows, open Device Manager → Display adapters. If the adapter is listed as "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter", no vendor GPU driver is loaded. Install or repair the correct driver (Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA depending on the hardware), reboot, and re-check chrome://gpu. After the fix, Video Decode should read "Hardware accelerated"; Video Compression can then be re-enabled and typing should stay responsive.

If the affected endpoint is itself a virtual machine without GPU passthrough (common in VDI and thin-client setups), no driver will help. In that case, keeping Video Compression off is the correct permanent configuration for that machine, not a workaround.

Trade-off of leaving Video Compression off

With Video Compression off, the session uses more bandwidth and full-motion video (for example, streaming a video inside the cloud desktop) plays less smoothly. Text, office applications, and coding work are unaffected. For a machine that cannot decode video in hardware, this trade is strongly in the user's favor.

If you need to contact Apporto Support

Please submit a support request and include: a screenshot of the chrome://gpu Graphics Feature Status and GPU0 sections (crop the browser's bookmarks bar and tabs before attaching), the browser and operating system versions, the approximate time of the affected session, and whether the Video Compression test above resolved the lag. With that information this issue can usually be confirmed on first contact.