Steam Remote Play Tests Pyrowave for Low-Latency Local Streaming

Valve added the experimental Pyrowave video codec to the Steam Client Beta on September 21, 2026 for Steam Remote Play. Unlike streaming codecs primarily optimized to minimize bitrate, Pyrowave is aimed at high-bandwidth local networks where encode and decode latency can matter more than conserving network capacity.

Valve says Pyrowave uses roughly five to ten times the bandwidth of its other streaming codecs and recommends connecting the computers directly to the router with at least Gigabit Ethernet. With automatic bitrate disabled, Steam exposes a manual range from 100 to 500 Mbit/s. Those figures describe network demand, not a promised latency or frame-rate improvement.

Pyrowave was created by Hans-Kristian Arntzen and is designed around very fast GPU processing. The project is an intra-only codec: frames are handled independently rather than depending on inter-frame motion prediction in the way conventional highly compressed video pipelines often do. That makes the approach attractive for latency-sensitive local streaming, but it also helps explain why its bitrate target is unusually high.

The important consequence is that Pyrowave does not make network latency disappear. Valve describes total video latency as the sum of encoding, network transport, decoding and display time. Reducing the codec portion can help only when the rest of that path is fast and stable enough, which is why Valve explicitly says an individual setup may or may not benefit.

A September 22 Steam Client Beta update fixed occasional flickering on Linux and SteamOS clients, moved Pyrowave encoding onto the compute queue to reduce contention with game GPU usage, and fixed a client GPU-memory leak when resolutions changed frequently. More recent Steam beta notes also list reduced Pyrowave latency when streaming from PipeWire on Linux and SteamOS plus a command-line option for logging encoding performance.

Those follow-up changes reinforce the beta status: Pyrowave is a live engineering path rather than a finished replacement for Steam's existing streaming codecs. Users on bandwidth-constrained Wi-Fi or internet links should not assume that consuming more bitrate will improve the experience.

Valve says HDR is selected automatically when both the host and client support it. Pyrowave also offers optional YUV 4:4:4, which preserves full chroma resolution and can be useful for desktop streaming or reading fine text on a 4K display, at the cost of some additional bandwidth and processing time.

For PC users with a wired local network, Pyrowave is therefore an unusual alternative to the usual efficiency-first codec strategy: it spends abundant LAN bandwidth to minimize work in the video path. Whether that produces a perceptible improvement depends on the complete streaming chain, so independent same-system measurements matter more than the codec's theoretical design alone.