Dota 2 Vulkan Performance Across MacOS, Windows 10 & Linux Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 5 June 2018 at 01:30 PM EDT. Page 2 of 3. 22 Comments.

In case you missed it with the initial figures shared a few days ago, Dota 2 with Vulkan is significantly faster than OpenGL for this popular Valve game. First up is a look at Ubuntu Linux vs. macOS with Dota 2 at lower resolutions using both OpenGL and Vulkan.

While Dota 2 with Vulkan is indeed much faster than OpenGL for this game on macOS, it looks like a large part of that impact may be due to the Apple OpenGL drivers simply being in a rough shape... Then again, Apple just deprecated OpenGL (and OpenCL too). On this MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro 450 graphics, the RADV Vulkan vs. RadeonSI OpenGL performance for Dota 2 was close to the same... Similar to what we have seen out of other graphics cards / systems for this game on Linux. Though even with Dota 2 on Vulkan under macOS, the Linux performance numbers were still faster! Windows results weren't done for the lower resolutions since the game or Windows driver configuration would keep scaling the resolution to 2880 x 1800 regardless of overrides in our tests.

Playing Dota 2 at the native 2880 x 1800 panel resolution is tough and will only get about 30 FPS out of the Radeon graphics on this MacBook Pro. Here though we see the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance being about the same on Linux, the Mac performance still doing much better than OpenGL, and the Windows 10 performance coming right in line with the Linux performance while the Mac Vulkan performance was just a two FPS average behind.


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