Steam Pyrowave: How to Enable It and Check Your Network

Pyrowave is an experimental video codec in the Steam client beta for Remote Play. It aims for the shortest possible delay between your gaming PC and the screen you stream to, and it pays for that with bandwidth: Valve says it uses five to ten times as much as other streaming codecs. On Wi-Fi or an ordinary home connection it is not worth trying yet. If both machines sit on gigabit Ethernet, it deserves an afternoon of testing.

What Pyrowave is

Hans-Kristian Arntzen created Pyrowave, and Valve says it uses the GPU for both encoding and decoding to keep end-to-end latency very low on a good network. His GitHub project calls it an intra-only codec, practically a still-image codec, written as Vulkan compute shaders. Every frame is compressed on its own. That explains the high bandwidth use, and it is also why the codec shrugs off lost packets: no frame depends on an earlier one.

The codec supports HDR, which Steam selects automatically when both host and client can do it. YUV 4:4:4 colour is optional because it costs a little more bandwidth and processing time. Valve says it can be worth enabling when you stream a desktop or read text on a 4K display.

The speed claims come from Arntzen. The project page puts encode and decode at under about 0.1 ms at 1080p and under about 0.2 ms at 4K. His 2025 design write-up measured 0.13 ms for a 1080p 4:2:0 encode on a Radeon RX 9070 XT, with decode under 100 microseconds. Those are the author's numbers on top hardware, not independent benchmarks.

The bandwidth bill

Arntzen's write-up says the codec works at 100+ Mbit/s where conventional codecs use 10 to 20 Mbit/s, and that streaming over the internet is realistic only on peer-to-peer fibre links. Valve asks for both computers to be connected directly to the router with at least Gigabit Ethernet.

Steam normally tunes the stream for visual quality. Each frame has a constant size, so a higher frame rate needs more bandwidth. A quality slider moves quality and bandwidth up or down together. If you need a cap, switch off automatic bitrate and set a fixed value. At launch the manual range was 100 to 500 Mbit/s. The October 1 client beta raised the manual ceiling to 1 Gbit/s, with a warning that more bandwidth increases latency.

The codec is only one part of the delay you feel. Valve defines total latency as encode plus network plus decode plus display time, so some setups will gain little. Turn on the performance graph in the Remote Play settings while streaming to see where the time goes. Aftermath tested it over wired Ethernet at about 500 Mbit/s with 4:4:4 and HDR and found it snappy, but also saw oddities streaming Control Resonant from Windows to a Steam Machine on early builds and calls it beta software that needs optimization.

How to enable Pyrowave in Steam

You need the Steam beta. Pyrowave is off by default and is switched on in the Remote Play advanced client settings. On Linux and SteamOS you must also enable the experimental SteamRT3 Steam client in System Settings. Several users in Valve's thread reported on launch day that the option did not show up. The reply from Valve's slouken gave the beta build date, September 21, 2026, and repeated the SteamRT3 reminder. Valve's updated announcement also lists Steam Link app betas for Apple and Android devices. Check that you are using the beta app on your receiving device.

Changes since launch

Valve ships the beta every few days and Pyrowave appears in most of the notes. The September 22 notes list a fix for flickering when streaming to Linux and SteamOS clients and a switch to the compute queue so encoding competes less with the game. The September 25 notes cut latency when capturing with pipewire on Linux and SteamOS and added a -pyrowavestats option that logs encoding performance. The September 29 notes raised Pyrowave's encoding priority for GPU-heavy games on Windows and added zero-copy encoding of Vulkan games on Windows and Linux.

The October 1 notes are the largest. They improve the automatic bitrate calculation, fix latency that crept up on slow links, reduce audio dropouts and add a dialog that helps you recover when your network cannot handle the current streaming settings. That update also reset Pyrowave bitrate to the automatic default, so re-check any manual value you set earlier.

The earlier notes are on Steam's own pages for September 22, September 25 and September 29.

Who should use it

Pyrowave suits a desk-to-living-room setup with a wired host and client, or a gaming PC streamed to a second screen in the same house. Stay on the default codec if you stream away from home, over a metered connection, or through a router that struggles at gigabit speeds. If you want a real game to test with, the free demos in Steam Next Fest from October 19 are a cheap way to try a few titles.

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