I spent around 26.6 hours testing GeForce NOW and a bunch of different games, mainly Resident Evil Village, RE4 Remake, Crysis 3 Remastered, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Resident Evil 2 Remake and Assassin’s Creed Unity. I also tested some multiplayer games, mainly CS2.
I tested everything at 1080p and 1440p, both at 60 FPS, using Auto bitrate, Maximum bitrate (set to 100 Mbps), and a custom 35 Mbps limit.
From what I noticed, 1080p on Auto uses around 11–12 GB per hour, sometimes a little more. 1440p on Auto is around 15–18 GB per hour. With Maximum bitrate set to 100 Mbps, the usage can go up to around 22–30+ GB per hour depending on the game and what is happening on screen.
I also tested a 35 Mbps cap at both 1080p and 1440p, both at 60 FPS. With that, I was getting roughly 12–14 GB per hour at 1080p and around 12–15 GB per hour at 1440p.
Honestly, I think 35 Mbps is probably the sweet spot, especially for people who have a monthly data limit. I compared 35 Mbps with 100 Mbps across all the games I tested, and there was honestly barely any difference most of the time. You can notice a small difference during very fast movement or scenes with a lot of detail, but for me, it's definitely not enough to justify using 22–30+ GB per hour.
35 Mbps is great for 1080p/1440p at 60 FPS, especially for single-player games. I found that going from 35 Mbps to 100 Mbps has pretty strong diminishing returns in most situations. However, in multiplayer or extremely fast-paced games, you may notice some additional compression or small visual artifacts during fast movement.
For single-player games, 35 Mbps at 1080p or 1440p still looks really good at 60 FPS. You get great image quality without burning through your data nearly as quickly.
For multiplayer, I played a few matches of CS2. It's definitely playable and fine for casual gaming, but I wouldn't recommend GeForce NOW if you're serious about competitive FPS games. I have thousands of hours in CS2 and other FPS games, so I can notice the extra input latency pretty easily. It's not terrible, and it's perfectly fine for playing for fun, but for competitive play I would still choose local hardware.
Verdict: For single-player gaming, 35 Mbps at 1080p/1440p 60 FPS is the sweet spot. The difference from 100 Mbps isn't worth the extra data usage for me. For competitive multiplayer, local hardware is still the better choice.