Steam’s New Codec Uses 10x Bandwidth

Steam's Pyrowave Codec Uses 10x More Bandwidth #steam #valve #gaming Valve recently integrated Pyrowave—an experimental codec created by graphics programmer Hans-Kristian Arntzen—into the Steam Client Beta to eliminate input lag in local game streaming. By flooding local networks with up to 500 Mbps of bandwidth rather than relying on heavy inter-frame compression, Pyrowave bypasses standard processing bottlenecks and slashes GPU encoding delay down to less than 0.1 milliseconds. This breakdown details the technical engineering behind intra-only wavelet transforms and Vulkan compute shaders, real-world benchmarks reaching 10ms end-to-end latency on wired LAN setups, and how Valve is leveraging raw gigabit bandwidth to transform host gaming PCs into zero-lag local servers. https://steamcommunity.com/groups/hom... https://github.com/Themaister/pyrowave https://themaister.net/blog/2025/06/1... Twitter   / watercs2