Item: DOTA2 vs DOTA 2- Reborn FPS Test
Rating: 9
Author: Muhammad Firdaus

Table of Content

Bench rig specification Result Conclusion

DOTA2 vs DOTA 2- Reborn FPS Test

Appearance - 9/10

9/10
Features - 9/10

9/10
Materials - 9/10

9/10
Performance - 9/10

9/10
Portability - 9/10

9/10
Value - 9/10

9/10

Overall

9/10

On 1st September 2015 we received a massive 5.8GB update for DOTA2 – Reborn. When the update was complete I couldn’t even launch the game. I had no clue what went wrong. I’ve tried searching for a workaround but it seemed like no one got it working at all. So I just tried deleting “-console” from SET LAUNCH OPTIONS and ran the VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME CACHE tool, and suddenly I got DOTA 2 – Reborn to launch. I suspect that you can’t set any commands in on set launch options menu.

Today I would like to talk about a simple test comparing DOTA2 – Reborn against the plain jane version of DOTA2, because in the change log there are many updates for the game and the following shortlist of changes piqued my interest.

Added full support for the 64 bit Dota client
Improved input processing latency
All Source 1 content (items, music packs, etc) is now in Source 2

What I’m going to do is run a 20 minutes FPS test, skipping the first 10 minutes of each game, because most games start to get intense around the 10th minute mark. I played a match in both DOTA2 – Reborn and DOTA 2, using Visage in both games. My goal is to determine whether is there any performance difference between DOTA2 – Reborn and DOTA2.

Bench rig specification

Operating system	Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU	Intel Xeon E3 1230 v3 @ 3.30 GHz
Motherboard	ASUS H87-PLUS
Monitor	DELL U2312HM (1920×1080 @ 60 Hz)
Graphics	ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 2048MB
OS Drive	111GB Corsair Force LS SSD
Game Storage	931GB Western Digital WD Blue

Result

This is the result after 20 minutes of gameplay. It’s quite apparent that DOTA2 – Reborn needs more GPU horsepower than DOTA2. I noticed that Valve is also limiting the DOTA2 – Reborn frame per second to 120fps. Before this, Reborn didn’t have a FPS cap, as I have proved that it was capable of running at over 120fps when I reviewed the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 OC graphic card.

	Min	Max	Average
DOTA 2 – Reborn	57	119	90.852
DOTA 2	53	122	113.898

There is not much data in this table, right? So let’s take a look at the graphs below.

Now we have a clearer view of what happen in 20 minutes of gameplay. DOTA2’s FPS is more stable than DOTA2 – Reborn’s, but this might be because DOTA2 – Reborn is still a BETA build and still could use some work. But if this is really what we will be getting when it comes out from BETA, you might need to get a new card to run it on the highest settings at 1920x1080p.

Conclusion

DOTA 2 – Reborn brings huge improvements by building it from scratch on the newer Source 2 engine. What can we see is that the game become hungrier on graphic side, but not only that since it support 64bit client. Currently I’m using the AMD HD 7850 and I am getting these results, maybe now it’s time to get a better card for this game, and I recommended at least an NVIDIA GTX 950 or the AMD R7 370.