4K/5K monitors: when your RDP session has small black bands limiting the height/width to 2048/4096 pixels

Sometimes RDP limits you to 2048 pixels vertical (or 4096 pixels horizontal)

Just found out why on some Windows versions, the RDP sessions form my 4K monitor has some small black bands on top/bottom: older versions of Windows limit their RDP server to 4096 x 2048.

A 4K monitor will not hit the width limit (as 4K cheats: it is usually “just” 3840 pixels wide), but it does hit the height limitation (2160 is slightly more than 2048: you miss 112 pixels that show as two small black bands).

A 5K monitor is worse: it will hit both limits (5K does not cheat: at 5120 × 2880 it is exactly 5*1024 pixels wide) so you miss 124 pixels horizontally and a whopping 832 pixels vertically.

Don’t buy a 5K monitor yet if you do a lot of RDP work to older Windows versions.

The link below has a table listing various Windows versions, but it omits end-of-life versions so I’ve done some testing: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 share the same limitations as Windows Server 2008 most likely because their latest service packs share the same RDP 6.1 version.

I updated this in the table:

Destination Endpoint	Remote Desktop Protocol Version	Max Resolution Per Monitor	Max Virtual Desktop Limit	RemoteFX vGPU max resolution (guest VM)
Windows XP SP3	RDP 6.1	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	N/A
Windows Server 2003 SP2	RDP 6.1	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	N/A
Windows Server 2003 R2	RDP 6.1	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	N/A
Windows Vista SP1	RDP 6.1	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	N/A
Windows Server 2008	RDP 6.1	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	N/A
Windows Server 2008 R2	RDP 7.0	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	32766 x 32766	N/A
Windows 7 SP1	RDP 7.1	4096 (w) x 2048 (h)	32766 x 32766	vGPU: 1920×1200 (2 monitors)
Windows Server 2012	RDP 8.0	8192 x 8192	32766 x 32766	N/A
Windows 8	RDP 8.0	8192 x 8192	32766 x 32766	vGPU: 2560×1600 (2 monitors)
Windows Server 2012 R2	RDP 8.1	8192 x 8192	32766 x 32766	N/A
Windows 8.1	RDP 8.1	8192 x 8192	32766 x 32766	vGPU: 2560×1600 (2 monitors)
Windows Server 2016	RDP 10	8192 x 8192	32766 x 32766	vGPU: 4K (1 monitor)
Windows 10	RDP 10	8192 x 8192	32766 x 32766	vGPU: 4K (1 monitor)

–jeroen

Via: Remote Desktop Protocol Maximum Supported Resolutions – TechNet Articles – United States (English) – TechNet Wiki