A system disclosed within this document is capable of improving performance in virtual computing environments, e.g., by reducing latency associated with streaming video data between a client device and an associated server system over a network. As discussed in detail below, such performance improvements can be achieved using techniques that avoid, reduce and/or overlap operations that are executed by the server system in order to render, encode, and/or transmit video data to a client device over a network. Such techniques can be used to reduce propagation and/or processing delays imposed by, for example, the server system's CPU operations, input/output (I/O), infrastructure, NIC, OS processes, among other types of hardware and software-based overheads. In various implementations, the performance enhancements can be realized at the rendering, encoding, or transmission operations performed by the server system.