Dota 2 7.00 Appears To Have Some OpenGL Performance Improvements

When Dota 2 7.00 changes were revealed on Sunday, the in-game/game-play changes were what was talked about with no real references to any "under the hood" changes for this Valve Source 2 Engine game. Thus when the 7.00 update came down the pipe today, I ran some before/after benchmarks.

Game engine updates and work on GL/Vulkan renderers are what excite me over game-play work, so this morning I ran some Dota 2 benchmarks prior to the 7.00 update landing. Once the 7.00 update then was released, I ran some tests using the same time demo and other settings as the earlier benchmarks, thanks to the test automation with the Phoronix Test Suite.

For these basic before/after benchmarks of Dota 2 7.00, I was using an AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card powered by the open-source driver stack with Linux 4.9 DRM and Mesa 13.1-dev via the Padoka PPA.

I did end up finding some performance changes with Dota 2 7.00. I emailed a Valve contact earlier about any Vulkan/OpenGL changes that might be found in 7.00, but as of writing have yet to hear back with any comments.



It does appear there are some OpenGL performance improvements with Dota 2 7.00, at least benefiting an RX 480 / RadeonSI on Linux.

The Vulkan performance was mostly unchanged at the lower resolutions.

Vulkan at 1080p is actually lower with the latest game update.


At 3840 x 2160, the OpenGL performance went down with the new update while the Vulkan performance was also regressed.

Those are the result I have so far in the few hours since Dota 2 7.00 landed, at least concerning the RX 480 with RadeonSI and RADV atop Mesa 13.1-dev / Linux 4.9. Stay tuned for more tests and if you've tried out Dota 2 7.00 be sure to share if you've noticed any OpenGL/Vulkan performance differences via our forums.