I live abroad but work for a US company and connect to my computer, located inside the company's office, through a VPN shell and then Windows' Remote Desktop function. I have a two-monitor setup at my local desk and use them both for RDP, the left one in horizontal orientation (email, Excel, billing software) and the right one vertical (for reading PDFs, drafting emails in Outlook, drafting documents in Word).
My computer shut itself off after hours in the US, so I had to get a Word document emailed to me so I could keep drafting it on my local computer. I feel like getting rid of the lag between [keypress] and [character appears on screen], due to RDP lag (admittedly mild), is making me 30% smarter. Like the delay was making me worse at thinking. It's palpable. So it's either real or some kind of placebo effect associated with me being persnickety or both. Anyone seen any data on this?
Yes, the value of minimizing response time is a well-studied area of human-computer interfaces: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/