If your internet service provider (ISP) has a data cap, then you might quickly run into that in case you plan to use Google Stadia a lot.

VentureBeat tested how much data traffic is generated via Google’s game streaming service, and they found some shocking results even on 1080p resolution, and 4K could be even worse than that. (Perhaps Google isn’t using the previously touted data compression technology? Or is that coming later, like many other functions?)

So VentureBeat started playing Red Dead Redemption 2, which was played on 1080p, at 60 frames per second. It generated 119 megabytes of traffic per minute. In one hour, that would be about 7.14 gigabytes, meaning you’d burn nearly a full dual-layer DVD with that traffic. Now, 4K should have four times as more pixels than on 1080p. Google has previously warned us that the Stadia could use up to 20 gigabytes of data traffic per hour. Alright, let’s multiply that 7.14 by four – that is 28.56 gigabytes, and let’s be fair, and round it down to 28. That’s almost 50% more than what Google touted as an „up to” value. OUCH!

Let’s say you’d play Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Stadia to the end. That needs 40-50 hours, so even if we round down 7.14 to 7, that still means it’d need 280-350 GB of data traffic, and if you want to do all sidequests, you can easily double that to 560-700 GB! That is already more data than what the PlayStation 4 Slim’s 500 GB HDD can hold! And in 4K (and let’s be fair once again, and just use a 2x or 3x multiplier instead of 4x), that could be up to 1.1-1.4 terabytes at the very least. (And even then, we didn’t even touch the 4G, 5G mobile streaming…)

So Google has a lot to improve on this front as well. However, as we discussed yesterday, the Stadia didn’t perform that well with pre-orders…

Source: WCCFTech

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