Stadia Uses 7GB of Data Per Hour At 1080p Streams

One big problem with streaming—data caps. While a lot of the world has thankfully moved on from them, in North America, at least, they are commonplace. Many households have an allowance of less than 100GB a month—which can be shockingly low, once streaming gets thrown into the equation.

Video and music streaming can already be data intensive, but you know what’s even more so? Game streaming. How intensive? Well, let’s look at Google’s just launched Stadia. VentureBeat ran some tests, and determined that an hour of Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p consumed 7GB of data. That’s just one hour, and at 1080p—imagine playing for longer, and in 4K. You could run up your data allowance for the entire month in one gameplay session.

Google has previously spoken about data caps, and how it believes that telecom providers will surely address this problem, but in the here and now, this is a major knock against their platform—which, by all accounts, is already underperforming, and doesn’t need more bad press.