Applicable Products

• Citrix Workspace App

Question and Answers

Citrix Workspace Windows On Mac

This article is intended for Citrix administrators and technical teams only.
Non-admin users must contact their company’s Help Desk/IT support team and can refer to CTX297149 for more information.

What’s changed?

We have optimized Citrix workspace app for macOS and retina displays within virtual desktop sessions.

Summary

There has been lot of interest from customers to support Retina displays on MacBooks with Citrix Workspace app for Mac. With the release of Citrix Workspace app for Mac 2102, Citrix Workspace app for Mac now supports high DPI (Retina) displays for desktop sessions. Try out this feature and provide suggestions and feedback so we can improve the feature.

Prerequisites

This feature is in Private Tech Preview and is disabled by default. You have 2 options.

Using Citrix Workspace On A Mac Dual Screens

• Request your Citrix Account manager to reach the Citrix Workspace app PM team to enable it and provide your organization’s Workspace or Storefront URL.
• To try out on individual MacBooks without enabling for the entire organization/store or if you do not want to whitelist LaunchDarkly on your internal network, you can run the following command in macOS Terminal
  • defaults write com.citrix.receiver.nomas EnableHiDPI –bool YES

1. Upgrade to Citrix Workspace app for Mac 2102 either through Auto Update or manually installing it from Citrix downloads page.
2. If you are launching the virtual desktop sessions from the Browser, after upgrading to version 2102 launch the Desktop session from Citrix Workspace app native mac client at least once to actually see the feature (so that the feature flags are synced to your machine.)

Recommendations

Use the DDC policies Video Codec: For actively changing regions or Video Codec: For the entire screen for better performance. Citrix Workspace app for mac has the capability to use hardware accelerated H264 decoder for better performance.

Citrix Workspace App On Mac

Limitations

• When the high DPI feature is enabled, the size of a desktop session window might get bigger than the actual display size. As a workaround, resize the window to a desired size manually after launching the session. [RFMAC-8127] · Optimization for retina displays are only enabled only for virtual Desktop sessions. Virtual App sessions are not supported yet.
• Supported devices: MacBook, MacBook Pro. Devices not supported: Mac mini, iMacs, Mac Pro.
• No Multi monitor support. This feature will not work if you have connected a secondary monitor. Even if you don't use the secondary monitor with the Citrix Workspace app, simply connecting it will cause this feature to not be available. This feature works only when you use a single monitor for your device.
• The session display is four times bigger and network bandwidth usage increases significantly. You might see performance issues if you have applied a bandwidth limiter.
• Increase in usage of Remote resources. For most of the users VDA CPU usage only increases marginally. Depending on the capacity and configuration of your VDA, the effect of CPU usage may vary. 3D Pro VDAs are best suited to handle these situations. Ensure that you use VDAs with adequate CPU and memory resources and GPU offloading in case you see degradation in the performance.

COMING SOON (we will update this article and Citrix Workspace app for mac release notes when these are available. We do not have a timeline as of now.)

• Support for single monitor retina 5k displays (Mac mini, iMacs, and Mac Pro).
• Support for multi-monitor scenarios.