Normally, VNC and other thin client environments for Unix and Linux either do not support running OpenGL applications at all or force the OpenGL applications to be rendered without the benefit of OpenGL hardware acceleration. Remotely displaying 3D applications with hardware acceleration has traditionally required the use of "indirect rendering." Indirect rendering uses the GLX extension to the X Window System ("X11" or "X") to encapsulate the OpenGL commands inside of the X11 protocol stream and ship them from an application to an X display. Traditionally, the application runs on a remotely located application server, and the X display runs on the user's desktop. In this scenario, all of the OpenGL commands are executed by the user's desktop machine, so that machine must have a fast 3D graphics accelerator. This limits the type of machine that can remotely display a 3D application using this method.