From PC Mag: Valve has introduced a new video codec in its Steam beta client that boosts the visual clarity of games streamed via Steam Remote Play. As VideoCardz reports, the Pyrowave codec uses 5-10x the bandwidth of existing streaming codecs, but it's extremely low latency, with full HDR and YUV 4:4:4 support for the best picture quality.
Steam Remote Play offers several streaming options to help manage bandwidth and maximize a game's visuals and responsiveness. Although lag is expected with streaming, the experience can feel quite close to native play when it works well. Pyrowave could get game streamers closer to native, albeit with some heavy bandwidth requirements.
In a community post, Valve explains that, because the codec uses much higher bandwidths—users can manually select between 100Mbps and 500Mbps, for example—this new codec will almost certainly require Gigabit Ethernet and is unlikely to function well over even later-generation Wi-Fi connections. Valve also warns that if your network can't handle this new codec's bandwidth demands, it's unlikely to offer any improvements to latency or video quality.
Developed by Hans-Kristian Arntzen, the codec achieves its impressive capabilities by ditching motion prediction. Instead of guessing where the user might move next and pre-rendering that data, it processes each frame independently. It yields additional efficiency savings, which is why the bandwidth demands of this codec are so much higher. But by using optimized blocks, the GPU can efficiently render and handle video encryption simultaneously, resulting in ultra-low-latency response times for this streamed experience.
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