Steam's New Pyrowave Codec Brings Near-Zero-Latency Streaming Over LAN

Valve added a new video codec to the Steam client beta on September 21, 2026. It's called Pyrowave, and it takes a sharp tradeoff: it uses 5–10× the bandwidth of conventional streaming codecs, in exchange for near-zero encoding latency. For anyone streaming games from a desktop to another device on the same Gigabit LAN, it's the closest thing to local play that Remote Play has ever offered.

The codec was developed by Hans-Kristian Arntzen — the engineer behind VKD3D-Proton, Valve's Vulkan-based DirectX 12 translation layer that dramatically improved Linux gaming compatibility over the past several years. That pedigree matters: Arntzen has a track record of shipping technically ambitious graphics work that actually holds up in production.

What Pyrowave does differently

Pyrowave runs on the Vulkan API, enabling GPU-accelerated encoding that minimizes the time between a frame being rendered and it being transmitted. It supports HDR output and YUV 4:4:4 color sampling — a meaningful improvement over the 4:2:0 chroma subsampling used by codecs like H.264, which visibly blurs fine text, UI elements, and high-contrast detail at anything below very high bitrates.

According to Valve's own Steam community post, Pyrowave is capable of streaming at up to 500 Mbit/s. That ceiling exists to make the full-fidelity, minimum-latency mode viable. The codec is not trying to be efficient — it's trying to be imperceptibly fast.

Who it's for

The bandwidth requirement is the filter. Gigabit Ethernet is the practical floor. Wi-Fi, even Wi-Fi 7, introduces too much jitter for the latency benefits to hold. This is a LAN-first tool, useful for scenarios like streaming from a gaming desktop in one room to a Steam Deck or another PC in another room over a wired connection.

Pyrowave is disabled by default. It must be enabled manually under the Advanced Remote Play client settings in the Steam beta client. Once enabled, the encoder and decoder negotiate automatically when both endpoints support it.

Linux and SteamOS support

Pyrowave is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. On Linux, it requires the experimental SteamRT3 client — Valve's next-generation Linux runtime container. Steam Deck users can access it through the SteamOS beta. The Steam Link mobile app doesn't support Pyrowave yet, but support is listed as coming in a future update.

For Linux users specifically, this is another sign of Valve treating its Linux platform as a first-class target rather than an afterthought. Pyrowave ships on Linux simultaneously with Windows, which wasn't always the case for experimental Steam features.

The bigger picture

Remote play has been a part of Steam since 2013, but it's always felt like a compromise compared to sitting directly at the gaming machine. Pyrowave is Valve's clearest statement yet that they want to close that gap for users with the hardware to take advantage of it. Whether the codec eventually ships as a stable, default option — or evolves to handle lower-bandwidth scenarios — will depend on how it performs out of beta.