Pyrowave comes to Steam Remote Play: lower latency, if your network can take the hit

Valve has added a new video codec, Pyrowave, to the Steam client beta. It is designed specifically for in-home game streaming through Remote Play. The news, reported by Gamereactor España, comes with a catch that is hard to miss. According to reports, the codec uses five to ten times more bandwidth than current streaming codecs. In return, it promises lower latency and a cleaner image.

Why do we care? Because latency is public enemy number one for anyone who plays seriously. Playing from the couch, from another room or from a laptop connected to your main PC has always come at a cost in milliseconds. Valve is tackling that problem head-on, even if it means sacrificing something many home networks don't have to spare.

What you need to know

• Pyrowave is already available in Remote Play in the Steam beta client.
• It processes each frame separately, without relying on motion prediction, and uses the GPU for both encoding and decoding.
• It supports full YUV 4:4:4 color and HDR, as long as both the host and the client support them.
• Bandwidth can be set between 100 and 500 Mbps, and Valve recommends Gigabit Ethernet at a minimum.
• On a lower-capacity network, you may not notice any improvement.

The bottleneck Valve wants to break

Many people assume that if their local network is wired, the latency problem is already solved. It isn't. As the source explains, even with raw network latency under one millisecond, the full pipeline can add up to tens of milliseconds before a frame appears on screen. That pipeline includes rendering, encoding, transmitting and decoding. The network is just one piece; the rest of the delay lives in video processing.

This is where Pyrowave changes the approach. Conventional codecs save data by relying on motion prediction: they take advantage of what repeats from one frame to the next so they can send less information. That compresses very well, but it creates dependencies between frames. Pyrowave gives up that technique and treats each frame independently. The logical result is that it moves far more data per second, but chains together less work and, in theory, makes you wait less.

Key figures

YUV 4:4:4 support is no minor detail either. It means keeping the full color information. That usually shows in small text, menus and HUDs, which are exactly the elements that suffer most in a heavily compressed stream.

Our take

We like the direction. For years, Remote Play has been a convenient tool, but one labeled “good for casual play, not for competing.” Valve prioritizing latency over saving data is exactly what those of us who obsess over every millisecond have been asking for. If it delivers on its promise, playing in another room would no longer feel like a watered-down version of playing at your PC.

But let's be realistic: requiring Gigabit Ethernet leaves a lot of people out. In both the Americas and Europe, many players rely on Wi-Fi for convenience or because the router is on the other side of the house. For them, Pyrowave may add nothing, and Valve's own guidance acknowledges as much. Also, for truly competitive play, we still think nothing replaces playing directly on the machine. We see Remote Play with Pyrowave as an upgrade for practice, casual sessions or testing settings, not a replacement for a tournament setup.

For content creators, the most exciting part is the image quality. Full color and HDR can make a real difference if you play on one machine and watch the match on another. That said, remember this is a beta: try it, measure your own latency and don't change your workflow until you've confirmed it performs as advertised on your network.

What do you think?

We want to hear about your experience. Is your home wired, or does everything run over Wi-Fi? Do you see Remote Play as a serious option for your sessions or just a workaround for playing from the couch? Drop by the team chat or our Discord and tell us: would you trade bandwidth for milliseconds?