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Arntzen's Pyrowave solves both of these problems (latency and quality) by working in a fundamentally different way from other video codecs. Instead of using Discrete Cosine Transforms and inter-frame encoding, Pyrowave is similar to Motion JPEG2000 and uses Discrete Wavelet Transforms along with intra-frame encoding. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, but a lot of upsides, too. You get very consistent quality from frame to frame (making it perfect for constant bitrate applications) and you also get excellent error resilience. Because Pyrowave is very simple and computed on the GPU's shader array rather than the video engine, which doesn't understand it , you also get insanely low latency, and there are no concerns about the capabilities of fixed-function hardware.
The downside? Well, it's in the headline: bandwidth. In the Steam beta client patch notes where Valve announced the addition of this feature, Valve notes that the codec uses "5-10 times the amount of bandwidth of other streaming codecs." So how much bandwidth is that, really? In a brief test of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis , streaming to a Lenovo Legion Go S from a desktop, we clocked Pyrowave on default settings at about 210 megabits per second. That's over 26 megabytes per second of video going down the line, which is an incredible amount of data to be sending over a network so you can play a video game in bed without sacrificing visual quality or frame rate.
But most notably, it was tangibly more responsive than the usual Remote Play experience, and best of all, the image quality was quite exceptional, especially once we ticked on the 4:4:4 mode. Unfortunately, we weren't able to see if the GPU overhead was overbearing with an RTX 5070 Ti and frame rates capped at 120 FPS for streaming.
Just for clarity's sake, while it's possible that Pyrowave streaming could cause service interruptions for other people on your LAN (and thus isn't suitable for high-traffic networks like at a company or large business), it is strictly intended to be used over your local network, not the Internet. As a result, your internet connection doesn't matter at all, so if you were worried about ripping through your data allotment on a metered connection, there's no need for alarm; all of the data sent is between devices on your network. Even the over-200 megabits-per-second of Pyrowave is peanuts compared to the tens of gigabytes per second your graphics card is sending to your display via DisplayPort or HDMI, after all.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_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#main
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