Steam's Pyrowave codec cuts streaming lag but demands five times the bandwidth

Valve has introduced Pyrowave, a video codec built specifically for in-home game streaming, to the Steam beta client's Remote Play feature. The new option promises lower latency and cleaner image quality but demands a substantial bandwidth increase to deliver those benefits.

Pyrowave addresses a real bottleneck in game streaming. Even on a wired local network with under a millisecond of raw latency, the process of rendering, encoding, transmitting and decoding a game stream can add tens of milliseconds of lag before a frame reaches the screen. Pyrowave tackles this by processing each frame independently rather than using motion prediction, alongside GPU encoding and decoding, full YUV 4:4:4 colour support, and HDR when both host and client support it.

The feature demands significant network resources. Users can configure bandwidth from 100 Mbps up to 500 Mbps, though Valve's guidance suggests at least gigabit Ethernet is needed for optimal performance. An under-provisioned network may see no latency or quality gains at all, a consideration for anyone streaming to handheld devices such as the RedMagic 11S Pro rather than a desktop.

Pyrowave is opt-in for now, accessed through Steam's Client Beta Participation setting and the Remote Play advanced options menu. Linux users need the experimental SteamRT3 client to access it. The feature is currently limited to desktop streaming and targets enthusiasts running fast wired local setups rather than typical Wi-Fi streaming.