Steam's beta client has added Pyrowave, a codec built specifically for in-home game streaming rather than repurposed from video playback. The codec was created by Hans-Kristian Arntzen, the developer known for the libretro framework and RetroArch, and it aims to fix the latency and image-quality problems common to existing streaming approaches.
Pyrowave works differently from mainstream codecs: it uses discrete wavelet transforms and intra-frame encoding, and it runs on the GPU's shader array instead of fixed-function video hardware. That design delivers very consistent frame-to-frame quality, strong error resilience, and extremely low latency. The tradeoff is bandwidth. Valve says Pyrowave uses 5-10 times the bandwidth of other streaming codecs, and Tom's Hardware measured roughly 210 Mbps in a test. In practice, the codec felt noticeably more responsive and produced excellent image quality, especially with 4:4:4 color enabled.
Pyrowave is intended strictly for local networks, so internet data caps are not a concern. Valve recommends at least Gigabit Ethernet, though some users report it works over Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7. The feature is currently available for standard games on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with Steam Link mobile support promised later.