His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
Moonlight has been a mainstay on my devices for years. Paired with Sunshine on my main gaming PC, it was the easy answer to in-home streaming, and filled a lot of holes in compatibility or convenience.
The quality of the stream was more or less fine, but as the displays in my home got larger and sharper, the limits of what the Moonlight and Sunshine pairing could do started to show, especially in worst-case scenarios. Steam Remote Play was the thing Moonlight and Parsec replaced initially for local streaming, though with its new Pyrowave codec implementation on a wired connection, the line between streaming and sitting in front of the host became blurred in the best way.
Pyrowave assumes a strong local connection
Most homes can do gigabit now
Every mainstream streaming codec is built to save bandwidth, with the usual suspects like H.264, HEVC, and AV1 all attempting to hit high-resolution streams into as few megabits as possible. This also puts a lot of load onto the encoder itself; image quality depends on how well the encoder can predict motion, and in a worst-case scenario like panning quickly across dense foliage, the weaknesses of these codecs becomes obvious.
Pyrowave throws that bandwidth-saving approach out the window. Its creator, Hans-Kristian Arntzen, designed it as an intra-only codec, so it compresses every frame on its own with no reference to the last one. The result is a major bandwidth increase, and Valve says it uses five to ten times the bandwidth of Remote Play’s other codecs. I run it at 4K and 120Hz with the bitrate set to 500Mbps, from my RTX 5080 desktop to my couch rig wired with Ethernet, as well as my laptops connected wirelessly on a 5GHz band.
The quality disparity on larger displays is difficult to unsee
Consistency is the word that came to mind immediately after trying Pyrowave for the first time. The picture in the middle of a firefight or fast-paced racing section holds up the way it does when I’m standing still, without the smearing I’d learned to expect when the whole screen changes at once.
Moonlight can match most of these settings on paper, with HDR, 4:4:4 chroma and bitrates up to 500Mbps, and bit for bit, HEVC is the more efficient codec. On a wired network, though, efficiency isn’t really what I'm aiming for, and the bandwidth trade-off here is more than worth it, especially for a large display.
The latency is low enough that I forget I'm streaming sometimes
Controller games are really strong with this setup
Dropping the motion prediction component of conventional codecs also makes Pyrowave quite fast. Encoding and decoding both run on the GPU, and Arntzen has measured a 4K frame encoding in a quarter of a millisecond on a Radeon RX 9070 XT. Valve is a little more conservative in its recommendation, and says that not every scenario will benefit from turning Pyrowave on.
For games that need good response times, it's near perfect. Rocket League, GTA V, and even EA Sports FC 27 all benefit heavily from this on controller in my experience. The reasoning is obvious for a racing game or anything fast-paced, but even in a sports game, there's nothing worse than feeling like your inputs are even slightly delayed. From the couch, it's really difficult to tell the difference between a Remote Play session and my main desktop.
It still has all the downsides of local game streaming
It's not absolutely perfect in every circumstance
At the end of the day, it's still streaming, and there's no clearer way to show that than with a first-person shooter. These are games that need response times above what you'd consider "good."
When I streamed Escape From Tarkov and Battlefield 6 to my mini PC with Steam Remote Play, I was surprised at the visual quality, but the latency being anywhere between 10 and 20 ms because of the time it takes for the frames to reach my display makes games like those a lot tougher to stream. Pyrowave helps a lot here, but you can still absolutely tell you're seeing a streamed image.
It's the best of the local streaming options
Moonlight and Parsec have the same weaknesses
Moonlight and Parsec share those weaknesses, and it's arguably worse with the conventional codecs those apps use. Normally, I wouldn't dream of playing a shooter that's streamed over the network, but Remote Play makes it tolerable, especially from a couch.
Compatibility is a bit of a wash between them, as you can make virtually anything into a Moonlight client, but most of my games are accessed through my Steam Library anyway. Steam Remote Play with Pyrowave is also currently limited to computers running the new Steam Beta, and both devices need to be enrolled in order to enable the new codec.
Steam is my new default for local streaming
Streaming codecs and software have spent years doing as much as they can with as little bandwidth necessary, but now that Steam Remote Play supports a codec that unleashes your bandwidth, it's my new go-to for game streaming.
Even over wireless, with a solid Wi-Fi 6 5GHz connection, I had the same sharp picture with very little latency, which is perfect for firing up casual games on a smaller screen. Parsec and Moonlight will always be there for thin clients that might not run Steam properly or can't handle the bandwidth necessary, but Steam Remote Play is my new go-to.