I initiated an informal research project to investigate Apple’s high-performance screen sharing mode. The objective is to understand its underlying mechanisms and ultimately enable comparable functionality on non–Apple Silicon devices.

Apple Screen Sharing on Apple Silicon has been surprisingly interesting to watch. Compared with the older Standard mode, the experience feels less like a routine performance upgrade and more like a genuine architectural shift. High Performance mode, in particular, stands out. It’s not just lower latency—it appears to introduce a different model of remote display entirely. It makes use of virtual displays, supports dynamic resolution changes, improves color fidelity (including HDR), carries stereo audio, and can even present dual virtual displays. Taken together, these features make it feel closer to a native display pipeline than a traditional remote desktop session.

Under heavy research, it seems no public accessible official specification, neither knowingly anyone has this implementation. Essentially, it's another VNC-based design, except the authentication is different from knowingly ARD, RSA/SRP is used instead. In encoding, it's using frame buffer, not video streaming; therefore, I firmly believe this is not exclusive to apple silicon, and even old as Intel Mac should be able to benefit from this new feature.

Noting too fancy, come check-out if you are interested.

https://github.com/LibVNC/libvncserver/issues/696