A distributed rendering system with compression of streams of rendering commands. The controlling device 110 fits streams of rendering commands to the rendering devices 120 within the frame duration by distributing compressed streams. Streams are compressed by caching relatively duplicative sequences of rendering commands. To provide additional efficiency, textures that are mapped to 3D objects can be stored at the rendering devices 120 such that they do not need to be sent from a controlling device 110 everytime the rendering device 120 needs them. Also, long chains of individual vertex calls can be converted on the fly into vertex arrays.