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

Last week Valve released their long-awaited Vulkan renderer for Dota 2 on macOS by making use of the MoltenVK driver they facilitated its open-sourcing of earlier in the year for bringing Vulkan to macOS/iOS via this wrapper layer to map Vulkan calls to Apple Metal drivers. The initial benchmarks of Vulkan'ized Dota 2 on Mac were quite compelling while for your viewing pleasure today are some additional data points.

With having a few more days with Dota 2 on Vulkan under macOS, here are some more interesting data figures. This is part of some larger macOS vs. Windows vs. Linux benchmarks to be published later this week as part of the week-long Phoronix 14th birthday benchmarking. This article today offers some figures of Dota 2 on OpenGL and Vulkan under macOS 10.13.4, Windows 10 Pro, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. In the follow-up general system benchmarks will also be a greater range of not only benchmarks but also other Linux distributions like Arch/Antergos, Clear Linux, and Fedora.

This testing was done from the same Apple MacBook Pro featuring an Intel Core i7 6700HQ processor that is quad-core / eight threads with a 2.6GHz base frequency and 3.5GHz turbo, 16GB of RAM, Radeon Pro 450 (Polaris 11) graphics, and a 2880 x 1800 panel. The same hardware/laptop was used across all of the operating systems tested; any noted differences in the automated system table just come down to differences in how the OS exposes the information for parsing (e.g. base vs. clock CPU frequency and RAM details).