NodeJS (just like Tomcat, Apache, etc) will probably do fine serving static files, while NGINX will give you much better performance since it was built in C and supports the sendfile system call which is as fast as you can get on a Linux OS.
See: blog.modulus.io/supercharge-your-nodejs-applicati…
The test I ran was 10,000 requests using 40 concurrent connections. Node.js averaged 862 requests/sec and Nginx averaged 1,608 requests/sec. This means Nginx can handle roughly double the throughput in my test environment.