Fixing Microsoft Office 2013 poor performance in RDS environment
After upgrading Microsoft Office 2007 to 2013, our RDS Server (previously known as Terminal Server) keep staying at 100% CPU usage and it’s users were complaining extreme slow performance of their Windows sessions.
We realize that Microsoft Office 2013 had enabled hardware graphics acceleration by default that caused this issue and proceed to disable it one by one on the RDS user side. We immediately see some performance improvement. (Firefox has similar performance issue in RDS environment where you need to disable hardware graphics acceleration as well.)
However, we cannot possibly keep doing this for every new user connecting to the server and they also have an option to re-enabled this at the expense of other users sharing the same environment. Thus, disabling this thru the Group Policy will be the best option.
First, download the Office 2013 group policy add on from:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35554
- Place the office15.admx file in C:WindowsPolicyDefinitions
- Place the office15.adml file in C:WindowsPolicyDefinitionsen-US
- Run gpedit.msc and enabled “Do not use hardware graphics acceleration”
Once this is done, every user login to the RDS server will have this option automatically enabled and gray out to prevent them from unchecking it!