Steam adds low-latency Pyrowave codec to Remote Play — new codec offers better game streaming on local networks but costs '5-10 times' more bandwidth

ID: 29381
Status: summarized
Published: 29 Sep 2026, 12:10 AM
Fetched: 29 Sep 2026, 12:46 AM
Provider: Tom's Hardware
Category: technology
Original URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/steam-adds-low-latency-pyrowave-codec-to-remote-play-new-codec-offers-better-game-streaming-on-local-networks-but-costs-5-10-times-more-bandwidth
Source URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all

Summary

Score: 3.0
Created: 29 Sep 2026, 12:47 AM
Tags: game-streaming codecs steam bandwidth-vs-latency
Audience: developers

What happened

Steam has added a new low-latency codec called Pyrowave to its Remote Play game-streaming feature, according to Tom's Hardware. The codec is reported to improve streaming quality on local networks but consumes '5-10 times' more bandwidth than the existing option. The excerpt contains almost no further technical detail — no supported hardware, resolution/framerate figures, rollout date, or opt-in mechanism — because the supplied text is largely subscription boilerplate.

Why it matters

If you stream games or remote sessions across a LAN — or you're building anything that trades bandwidth for latency (remote dev boxes, cloud gaming, thin-client setups) — this is a concrete data point that the low-latency win costs roughly 5-10x the bits, which will break on Wi-Fi or capped connections even when it looks fine on wired Ethernet. Beyond that, the source text doesn't say which GPUs/clients support Pyrowave or whether it's default or opt-in, so there's nothing actionable to configure yet; treat this as a watch item, not a change to make.

Discussion angle

The 5-10x bandwidth tradeoff is the whole story: ask who in the room actually has the LAN headroom for it, and whether the same latency-vs-bandwidth tradeoff shows up in their own remote-work or streaming tooling — then note that the article gives no hardware support list or rollout date, so nobody can test it from this source alone.