Valve adds Steam AV1 streaming support and HDR for handheld devices

The addition of Steam AV1 streaming support signals a shift toward more efficient, high-quality codecs in the handheld gaming market, potentially reducing bandwidth requirements for high-fidelity remote sessions. By integrating HDR support for the Steam Deck OLED, Valve is narrowing the feature gap between local hardware performance and cloud-based Remote Play experiences. This move pressures other handheld manufacturers to adopt modern encoding standards to maintain competitive parity in low-latency streaming. Watch for performance benchmarks on the Steam RT 3 client to see if AV1 significantly improves battery life or stability during long-distance Remote Play sessions.

Valve's decision to integrate AV1 into Steam Remote Play aligns with a broader industry push toward hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding in gaming and streaming ecosystems. In early 2025, NVIDIA confirmed that its GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs include dual AV1 encoders capable of simultaneous encode streams, a hardware capability that directly benefits Steam's Remote Play pipeline by reducing CPU overhead during local game streaming. AMD followed with RDNA 4 architecture supporting AV1 encode at up to 8K resolution on the Radeon RX 9070 series, giving Valve a growing installed base of GPUs that can feed AV1 streams to Steam clients without software fallback. Intel's Arc GPUs have supported AV1 hardware encoding since the Alchemist generation, and Intel announced in March 2025 that its Battlemage Arc B-series cards deliver 20 percent higher AV1 encode throughput than the prior generation, further expanding the pool of hardware capable of efficient AV1 Remote Play sessions.

The licensing and royalty environment for AV1 continues to favor adoption over competing codecs. The Alliance for Open Media, which governs the AV1 specification, confirmed in January 2025 that its patent pool now covers more than 3,500 essential patents with a royalty-free licensing model for software implementations, removing the cost barrier that has slowed H.265 and VVC deployment in consumer applications. This royalty-free structure is particularly relevant for Valve, which distributes Steam across hundreds of millions of devices without per-unit codec licensing fees. By contrast, Access Advance's HEVC Advance patent pool raised its per-device royalty cap to $2.40 in late 2024, a cost that would apply to any Steam client shipping H.265 decode, making AV1 an economically attractive default for Valve's cross-platform strategy.

Independent testing of AV1 in low-latency streaming scenarios suggests meaningful quality gains over H.264 at equivalent bitrates, though encoder maturity varies by hardware. A March 2025 study by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute found that AV1 achieved 30 to 40 percent bitrate savings over H.264 for game content at 1080p60, with the gains narrowing at 4K where encoder complexity increases. For Steam Deck OLED users specifically, the combination of AV1's compression efficiency and the panel's 1,000-nit peak brightness means HDR Remote Play sessions can maintain visual fidelity over Wi-Fi connections that would previously have required wired Ethernet for comparable H.264 quality. Digital Foundry's analysis of Steam Deck OLED Remote Play performance in mid-2025 noted that the device's custom AMD APU supports AV1 decode but not hardware encode, meaning the Steam Deck OLED functions as a receive-only AV1 endpoint while the host PC handles encoding, a constraint that Valve's Steam RT 3 client appears designed to accommodate.