Google Stadia’s data use is over 100MB per minute at 1080p

Google Stadia is every bit the data hog that everyone was expecting. The service warns that it can use between 4.5GB and 20GB of data per hour. Where you’ll fall within that range depends on the quality of the video feed you get from Stadia. But I didn’t want to just take Google’s word for this, so I set up a quick test. At 4K and 60 frames per second, 20GB per hour seems right in line with my experience.

Tracking data use by device is more difficult than it should be. But I settled on connecting a Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller to my phone as a hotspot. I could then use Android’s built-in data-usage tracker. The problem here is that I could only get 1080p quality from Stadia instead of 4K I get over my broadband connection. But the results still illustrate how much data Stadia eats.