Vibepollo PyroWave v1.18.4-pyrowave.1

Experimental, unofficial build of Vibepollo 1.18.4-stable.2 with a PyroWave encoder. PyroWave is Themaister's low-latency intra-only wavelet codec, and this encoder runs on the GPU through Direct3D 12.

PyroWave trades bandwidth for latency. Every frame is coded on its own, so encoding takes about 3 ms at 4K, but it needs several hundred Mbps to look good. HEVC gives better image quality at a fraction of the bitrate. Use it only if latency matters more to you than picture quality.

The client is Moonlight PyroWave for Xbox. Other Moonlight clients connect as usual and get HEVC/H.264/AV1.

Requirements

• Windows 10/11
• AMD Radeon GPU for PyroWave. The encoder needs 64-wide waves (Shader Model 6.6), which NVIDIA and Intel GPUs lack. On those GPUs the other codecs work as usual. Tested on an RX 7900 XT.
• Wired gigabit Ethernet to the client

Install

• Run VibepolloSetup-1.18.4-pyrowave.1.exe. The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen warns about it: choose More info → Run anyway.
• It installs as Vibepollo and replaces an existing Vibepollo install. To go back, uninstall it and install upstream Vibepollo.
• Update checks follow this fork's releases.
• Upstream's TrueHDR runtime is not included in this build.

Measured (4K60, Xbox Series X client, RX 7900 XT, wired gigabit)

	PyroWave 500 Mbps	HEVC 200 Mbps
Host encode	2.6 ms	7.0 ms
Frame arrival	11.0 ms	4.5 ms
Pipeline total (sum of medians)	≈37 ms	≈46 ms

On quality, HEVC and AV1 score 3–9 dB higher PSNR than PyroWave at the same bitrate (1080p60 game clips). PyroWave at 4K60 and 500 Mbps scores about 37 dB.

Source and credits

• Source: pyrowave branch. GPLv3, like upstream.
• PyroWave by Hans-Kristian Arntzen (Themaister).
• Vibepollo by Nonary, built on Apollo and Sunshine, with PyroWave groundwork by andygrundman.