Dota 2 Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance Redux

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 26 May 2016 at 02:10 PM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 44 Comments.

Earlier this week I published some Dota 2 Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux. Since then I received some feedback from Valve with regards to Dota 2 on the Source 2 Engine testing along with a better demo to use for benchmarking and also using the latest Dota 2 Vulkan DLC updates. So here is a fresh look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for this popular Valve game on an assortment of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards.

Tests were done using the pts/dota2-1.2.0 test profile and the NVIDIA driver used during benchmarking was the 367.18 beta while on the red side was the AMDGPU-PRO 16.20.3 driver. This latest test profile makes use of a more demanding time demo during the Dota 2 benchmarking, enforces autoconfig_level 3, etc.

Compared to the earlier tests, I also ran some more benchmarks at lower resolutions too. Via the Phoronix Test Suite the graphics cards benchmarked included the R7 260X, R9 285, R9 290, and R9 Fury when it came to coverage on the red side with the AMDGPU-PRO driver. The tested NVIDIA cards included the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X. All of the testing happened on the same Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

With already covering Dota 2 with Vulkan a lot this week, let's jump straight to these results.


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