A DIYer Coded A Better Steam Remote Play – Now Valve Is Making It Official

One of the more interesting features present on PC gaming client Steam is the Remote Play function. In the same way that you can stream console games to a PC or to a handheld like a Steam Deck, Remote Play allows you to access and play games from your Steam library by streaming them over your network connection, which allows you to play them on other devices like a phone, tablet, or TV elsewhere in your home. This also facilitates Steam's Family Sharing function, allowing you to share libraries to other PCs on the same network. Unfortunately, a consistent scourge when it comes to streaming and cloud-based gaming is one of latency, with the time and effort it takes to stream gameplay resulting in annoying quirks like input lag. One particular coder was so tired of these quirks, they took it upon themselves to fix it, and apparently, Valve liked the result.

Valve has added a new codec in beta to Steam's Remote Play functionality aimed at reducing latency when streaming games between two devices on the same network. This codec, Pyrowave, was apparently coded entirely by a single individual named Hans-Kristian Arntzen, also known in online circles as "TheMaister" for his hand in creating several other noteworthy frameworks and frontends. You can try it for yourself by opting into the experimental SteamRT3 Steam Client via your Steam system settings.

According to an explanatory post about Pyrowave made to the Steam user forums by Valve employee slouken, the purpose of Pyrowave is to cut down streaming latency on local networks as much as realistically possible by simplifying the video encoding process. By using your PC's GPU to encode and decode frames, you get streaming video quality that is both much closer to native resolution and stronger against sudden errors. It also allows users to encode picture colors with much more precision, and even enable HDR for expanding ranges of color and brightness.

However, all of these upshots do come with a rather considerable downside: bandwidth usage. While typical Remote Play codecs cause latency and reduced video quality, they are a little easier on your network's total bandwidth. Pyrowave, inversely, uses about 5-10 times the bandwidth as Remote Play's usual codecs, requiring at least 100 Mbps of bandwidth at the bare minimum to operate. Valve recommends only using Pyrowave if you have two PCs connected directly together via a router equipped with Gigabit Ethernet.

The logic here is that if you're streaming a game between two PCs on the same local network, bandwidth isn't really as much of an issue, so you might as well put the bandwidth towards optimizing. If you've got sufficient bandwidth on your home network, as well as a compatible setup, Pyrowave could make for a tangible improvement on your overall quality when using Remote Play.