The first preset, "Fastest", turns off every effect in the game. Each setting can be tweaked on its own, but Valve offers four presets on a slider from "Fastest" to "Best Looking": Aside from sheer resolution, the rendering options will provide the most flexibility for performance and appearance tweaking.
However, you will need a system with a relatively powerful (quad-core) CPU in order to high framerates even then.Īs mentioned earlier, Valve gives the user a lot of control over most aspects of the visuals, offering options regarding screen ratio, exclusive/bordered/windowed mode, and rendering options for additional effects such as ambient occlusion, fog, normal mapping, VSync, anti-aliasing, and texture/shadow quality. If you are stuck on a laptop with integrated graphics, your best bet will be to lower the resolution and effects as much as possible to stop the GPU from bottlenecking your system.
Thus, if you want to play at 1080p and high detail, at least a GTX 965M or 1050 are recommended for the best performance. Even the beefy 7700HQ fails to delivery playable framerates above 768p and medium settings with the HD630 integrated graphics. This is not to say at all that the CPU is more important than the GPU for Dota 2. On the contrary, the array of notebook benchmarks ranging from the 6820HQ and 7700HQ down to Core M and Atom processors reveal the extent to which a dedicated GPU is necessary to play Dota 2 at smooth framerates at 1080p. For the desktop, it seems that a cutting-edge graphics card like the GTX 1080 is only able to prove its worth and differentiate itself from low-end cards at the highest possible resolutions and detail levels. At 1080p/ultra, however, even the 2GB GTX 1050 performed on par with the GTX 1080. Switching to a GTX 1050 (2GB) yielded a 63% decrease in average FPS. The difference was most pronounced at 2160p (4k) resolution and ultra details, where the Nvidia GTX 1080 soundly trounced the last generation (but still high-end) R9 Fury with 26% higher FPS on average. Although Dota 2 and the Source 2 engine have a reputation for being CPU-bound, that did not seem to be the case for our tower with the 4790K.
The i7 4790K desktop was tested with multiple cards, including both Nvidia ( GTX 1080, 980 Ti, 1050 Ti, and 1050) and AMD ( Radeon R9 Fury, RX 480, R9 290X, and R9 280X).
A variety of resolutions and detail presets were used, ranging from 720p and minimum detail to 2160p on ultra.
To account for the full measure of scalability possible with the Source 2 engine, the range of systems include a desktop with an i7 4790K and Geforce GTX 1080 on the high end while the low end extends all the way down to a Cherry Trail Atom Z8300 with integrated graphics. The benchmarks collected are from a variety of CPU and GPU combinations which cover high, middle, and low-end systems. Because of the improved multithreading support, Dota 2 should make full use of all available CPU cores and threads, meaning we should expect to see the CPU have a greater impact on performance than more GPU-intensive games. The changes are meant to make the already extremely scalable engine even more so, improving performance both on low-end notebooks with the settings down and high-end enthusiast desktop systems with all the bells and whistles.
The Source 2 engine is not only only prettier than the original Source, adding better textures, particle effects, and a unified lighting system, but it is better optimized as well: Valve added support for DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs, and improved multithreading. The once sparse and simple battlefield of the Dire and Radiant has become a fully flushed-out world complete with weather effects, day and night cycles, and lushly detailed terrain and wildlife unique to each side of the battlefield.ĭota 2 officially moved to the Source 2 engine in the latter half of 2015 after an extensive period of beta testing. The low-poly models, simple textures, and basic effects of Defense of the Ancients have understandably transformed over the years, most markedly in the move to a Valve-backed Source engine game-and then again as it was ported to Valve's Source 2 engine a few years later.
Dota 2 has come a long way since its initial 2003 release as a mod for Blizzard's Warcraft III.