Well, it’s that time of the week and Valve is doing Valvy stuff again. Steam’s beta client has a new experimental streaming option called Pyrowave. Valve’s description is simple: high bandwidth, low latency video streaming.
That means Steam is sending a fatter video signal so it does not have to squeeze the picture as hard. Squeezing takes time. Time is lag. Pyrowave spends more data and less time.
You turn it on in Steam Settings under Remote Play, in the advanced client options. It ignores the usual bitrate cap and uses at least 250 Mbit/s. You need a fast home network. Wired is best. Weak Wi-Fi will not love this.
It first showed up in the Steam Client Beta around July 1. It disappeared from some later betas and came back. As of September 22 you can try it on Windows and Mac Steam Beta. Linux can get it if you enable the SteamRT3 client. The Steam Link phone app is listed as coming soon.
Pyrowave is not a Valve-made mystery format. It is an open codec built for local game streaming. It compresses each frame on its own so it does not wait on the last one. The author published encode times under about a tenth of a millisecond at 1080p. That is the whole trick. Fast encode, fat pipe, less delay on the couch or in another room.
This is still beta. It is not the default on the normal Steam client. It is not a cloud service. It is for streaming from your PC to another device on your network, including anything that uses Steam Link.
If your network can carry it, flip the toggle and try it. You got nothing to lose.
