Valve Is Finally Releasing Dota 2 With Vulkan Support Very Soon

[ThE_MarD]

Heyyo,

Truly wonderful the mind of a zealot is. It's only logical that if you swear by open software, you should be entitled to free hardware as well. /s

Also, is Dota2 suffering from driver bottleneck? Because if it isn't, Vulkan won't do much for this title. My guess is Valve wants to check for correctness first (like Croteam) and move to demanding titles after they confirm Dota2 is ok.

Yeah I agree with bug77... what the heck people... I'm pretty sure Michael even has an AMD R9 Fury and a GTX 980 Ti if I remember his benchmarks... how is having the latest GPUs considered a bad thing? Besides, every reviewer out there have to try and make revenue... afaik Phoronix doesn't have a YouTube channel where they try and generate revenue off of ads or YT Red subscribers or Vessel... so... ads on the website and subscribers are the only major source of income from Phoronix. The fact that he has had continued sucess on having the latest GPUs and such a wide variety of tests and hardware is more of a testament to the Linux community. To bash Michael for wanting to stay as up to date as possible is damn harsh.

I agree that Vulkan won't give amazing performance results for Nvidia users, but it has long been known and shows in every benchmark that Michael has put out that OpenGL on AMD has always been crippled compared to Nvidia... luckily Vulkan does fix that which is darn exciting. I do have an MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G so I haven't bothered trying Linux gaming on it after I sold off my GTX 680s but once a stable release for GCN 1.1 of AMDGPU comes out? I'll probably start tinkering after I see more promising results from Phoronix.

As for Vulkan in DOTA 2? The game does seem to be more CPU limited than GPU limited where-as The Talos Principle suffered the opposite problem, so I do see Vulkan getting a pretty decent performance boost compared to OpenGL even for Nvidia... but of course, that's more on speculation until proper benchmarks start popping out.

[juno]

Yeah I agree with bug77... what the heck people... I'm pretty sure Michael even has an AMD R9 Fury and a GTX 980 Ti if I remember his benchmarks... how is having the latest GPUs considered a bad thing? Besides, every reviewer out there have to try and make revenue... afaik Phoronix doesn't have a YouTube channel where they try and generate revenue off of ads or YT Red subscribers or Vessel... so... ads on the website and subscribers are the only major source of income from Phoronix. The fact that he has had continued sucess on having the latest GPUs and such a wide variety of tests and hardware is more of a testament to the Linux community. To bash Michael for wanting to stay as up to date as possible is damn harsh.

You got that wrong. It's not bashing, it's request. Bashing would be saying "DON'T BUY THIS, IDIOT". But instead we are making suggestions: Why not buy the 1070 instead, don't go for the early adopter surcharge (the founder's edition has), because they didn't send a sample and save something for upcoming Vega, Polaris, big Pascal, Volta, Bristol Ridge, Summit Ridge, Cannonlake, you know, the more interesting products?
It's not a bad thing trying to stay up to date. Yes, he has a Fury and a 980 Ti - both use salvage chips. He obviously likes to go for salvage chips, he does it all the time. He has not bought a Titan, Titan X, Fury X, 290X, 380X. And it makes sense, because if you know the metrics of the salvage, you could easily deduce the performance of the full chip.

[bug77]

You got that wrong. It's not bashing, it's request. Bashing would be saying "DON'T BUY THIS, IDIOT". But instead we are making suggestions: Why not buy the 1070 instead, don't go for the early adopter surcharge (the founder's edition has), because they didn't send a sample and save something for upcoming Vega, Polaris, big Pascal, Volta, Bristol Ridge, Summit Ridge, Cannonlake, you know, the more interesting products?
It's not a bad thing trying to stay up to date. Yes, he has a Fury and a 980 Ti - both use salvage chips. He obviously likes to go for salvage chips, he does it all the time. He has not bought a Titan, Titan X, Fury X, 290X, 380X. And it makes sense, because if you know the metrics of the salvage, you could easily deduce the performance of the full chip.

Well if you do so, I never want to see you begging for donations or I could not take you seriously again...

Is that a request?
And tbh, I think AMD never sent cards to Phoronix, Michael bought every single one. He goes to buy one Nvidia card and all hell breaks loose.

Signing out, I think we blew this out of proportion enough already.

[juno]

Yes, you could villainise me for that single sentence and ignore all the further explainations, that's up to you. I already apologised for that sentence and I think I made it rather clear that it should not be taken literally and also the reasons I had for saying that.
If you didn't notice: this is not about AMD vs. Nvidia, it's about which products imho make sense for phoronix to benchmark and which doesn't. I'd say the same if there would appear tests for an comparable AMD product, but I already wrote that and pointed out why. If you have not been willing to read it until now, it won't help to go into detail again.

[Nille_kungen]

Is that a request?
And tbh, I think AMD never sent cards to Phoronix, Michael bought every single one. He goes to buy one Nvidia card and all hell breaks loose.

Signing out, I think we blew this out of proportion enough already.

I think he used to get AMD a long time ago.
It's not that he's thinking of buying an nvidia card only that i see no value in buying the overpriced Founders Edition or some handpicked overclocked card, it's cheaper and better for general testing to use a normal non OC retail card.
I do not think that reference cards and overclocked cards has anything to do in a test unless he OC a normal retail card for testing.
I do get that Michel likes hardware an would like the best of the best right now but it's not the best for general testing and i think he should save some money and (also) buy some other hardware instead.
I actually think he should wait until polaris is out (shouldn't be to far) since the price might be a little bit better then and at least even with polaris being low and middle end hardware he has something to compare against since polaris might handle 4k and vulkan better then previous cards.

[Kano]

Dota 2 is a game I never play but has certainly lots of users (just look at Steam stats).
Basically only 2 games are main targets to switch from Source 1 to Source 2: Dota 2 and CS:GO. TF 2 has only 10 % of all CS:GO players but maybe in the future. Will be interesting to see how much smoother the game can be with Vulkan. I don't expect much more speed for Nvidia card users but maybe for AMD. As I don't think that Source used tesselation it might work with Intel too.

[bug77]

I think he used to get AMD a long time ago.
It's not that he's thinking of buying an nvidia card only that i see no value in buying the overpriced Founders Edition or some handpicked overclocked card, it's cheaper and better for general testing to use a normal non OC retail card.
I do not think that reference cards and overclocked cards has anything to do in a test unless he OC a normal retail card for testing.
I do get that Michel likes hardware an would like the best of the best right now but it's not the best for general testing and i think he should save some money and (also) buy some other hardware instead.
I actually think he should wait until polaris is out (shouldn't be to far) since the price might be a little bit better then and at least even with polaris being low and middle end hardware he has something to compare against since polaris might handle 4k and vulkan better then previous cards.

Well, Founders Edition will be released together with rest of the cards, so there's really no point in getting one of those.
As for waiting for Polaris, yes it would make a bit more sense to compare new generation cards (even if they're not on the same level), but the money's always in having the review out asap. In that sense, Michael is already hurting, because everyone knows what the GTX 1080 can do. The more he waits, the less page hits he attracts.

[YellowOnion]

Alright, so here's the deal with Dota 2 (from what I understand)

Dota 2 implements a one-frame delay model, so that you can process the CPU side of stuff while the previous frame is being rendered on the GPU, this means that input latency is increased, but the FPS is doubled, I believe Vulkan has things like Async Compute that can allow you to maintain a high FPS while minimizing latency.

Dota 2 uses Source 2 which was written for modern APIs, this includes a custom multithreaded command queue for DX9 (which is currently their fastest API).

From personal experience Dota 2 is far more demanding than CS:GO, CS:GO is only a slightly improved version of CS:S which ran on Single Core Athlons, back in the day, There's nothing majorily different that would cause this game to need a modern API.

Dota 2 at its core is an RTS, so it has to draw a huge load of units on screen, all with independent animations and orientations. This is where old APIs suffer, even other games like Starcraft II can't scale past 2 cores because of similar issues.

Source: Youtube "Vulkan Session @ GDC 2016 Part II" Skip to 1h14m~30s

[untore]

Alright, so here's the deal with Dota 2 (from what I understand)

Dota 2 implements a one-frame delay model, so that you can process the CPU side of stuff while the previous frame is being rendered on the GPU, this means that input latency is increased, but the FPS is doubled, I believe Vulkan has things like Async Compute that can allow you to maintain a high FPS while minimizing latency.

Dota 2 uses Source 2 which was written for modern APIs, this includes a custom multithreaded command queue for DX9 (which is currently their fastest API).

From personal experience Dota 2 is far more demanding than CS:GO, CS:GO is only a slightly improved version of CS:S which ran on Single Core Athlons, back in the day, There's nothing majorily different that would cause this game to need a modern API.

Dota 2 at its core is an RTS, so it has to draw a huge load of units on screen, all with independent animations and orientations. This is where old APIs suffer, even other games like Starcraft II can't scale past 2 cores because of similar issues.

Source: Youtube "Vulkan Session @ GDC 2016 Part II" Skip to 1h14m~30s

csgo is not even demanding in pub servers (16+) let alone standard 5v5, csgo has very little stuff going on in general, granades animations are barebones, also for balance, and cosmetics are texture only.
tf2 peak clusterfuck scenarios has all kinds of flashes, explosions, ubers, turrets etc...and hats with their own animations...tfs has always been heavy cpu limited.
dota is also cpu limited but much less than tf2, however it happens to be cpu limited in its standard 5v5 in critical moments, prominently during team fights where a lot of spells are casted at once and when it gets crowded with multiple creeps waves/illusions/minions in attack/defense scenarios

[haagch]

Older benchmark, but especially the 370 (GCN 1.0) result is still relevant: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...BE-370PREVIE88