I've used both X forwarding over SSH and RemoteDesktop to an XRDP server to work remotely, quite often. I've found the differences interesting. . . In general, the RemoteDesktop connection is faster. Significantly. To the point that I use it routinely now that it's available to me. But I've noticed that when it comes to doing something like simple text scrolling, it's actually slower than the X fowarding I did prior (in an xterm or equivalent), probably because it's thinking of the window as an image instead of simply being able to send the text update. It's annoying when trying to scroll through huge text log files, so for me, X wins there. . .

Using X and XV on a 486 to view images generated by POV-Ray on Sparc 10. I learned a ton of stuff about bash, gcc, Linux, ftp, make, X. . . just so I could view a picture I created. And it wasn't even a good one. This was sometime in late 1994 I think.