Pyrowave: Steam's New Codec Slashes Latency

A new video codec named Pyrowave has been released in Steam beta, offering high bandwidth and low latency for Steam Remote Play. This new technology is accessible on macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Pyrowave is designed to achieve extremely low end-to-end latency by leveraging a computer's GPU for frame encoding and decoding. This process is crucial for a responsive gaming experience when streaming.

While the company acknowledges that Pyrowave may not optimize every user's setup, it reportedly uses five to ten times the bandwidth of other streaming codecs. This increased bandwidth requirement is a trade-off for the enhanced latency reduction, particularly benefiting users with stable network connections.