A “Remote Display Generator,” as described herein, provides various techniques for providing high-fidelity displays with highly responsive interactive application experiences to clients across a wide range of network bandwidths for remotely hosted applications. In general, the Remote Display Generator uses a compression-friendly remote display architecture as a core. With this compression architecture, actual screen data from a remote server is read out from the display buffer frame by frame, and then compressed with a unified screen codec. Other technologies, including timer-driven screen update models and adaptive transmission mechanisms, are then integrated with various embodiments of the Remote Display Generator to improve overall user experience by improving display quality and responsiveness to user interaction with remotely hosted applications.