Having FPS Issues in DOTA 2? This Valve Performance Test Might Help

Community DOTA 2 have complained about deteriorating game performance since the arrival of patch 7.00. And until now, IceFrog or Valve have not solved this problem until now, some players feel that game performance is getting worse with each release of a new update.

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Not only those with mediocre PCs who experience this game’s performance problems, but some players with high-end PCs also experience the same thing. This gaming community on Reddit started asking Valve to immediately provide a patch for this problem, but it seems that this has not been realized with their busy work balancing to the hero pool and gameplay as well as the upcoming Kiev Major soon.

Wykrhm Reddy, a figure who is widely known by the DOTA community as the moderator of the DOTA 2 subreddit, the latest DOTA 2 information provider, as well as the man who is suspected by many to be IceFrog, has just made a guide about the Performance test that has been injected by Valve in the hope of providing a solution for those who experiencing FPS problems while waiting for the patch from the party Icefrog or Valves.

The following are the steps that need to be done to perform a performance test.

1. Turn on Console Command in the game

In this guide, you must make sure you have activated the console command in the game before moving on to the next step. To activate the console command can be done in the options Settings> Options> Advanced Options > Games and click ‘Enable Console‘, or install the command “-vconsole” or “-console” in the launch option.

2. Run Performance Test

There are several performance test options offered by Wykrhim, but the stages are almost the same and it’s up to you to choose which one.

Performance test on demo heroes

Start Hero demo with any hero.
Level up any skill so that the “+” icon disappears.
Pause games.
Press the console button (usually the ` button next to button 1).
Enter the command “exec_async perftest” to run tests.

Performance test with Local bot game

Start the game bot from the “Play Dota” option.
Enter the command ‘sv_cheats 1′ on the console.
Choose any hero, and level up any skill.
Run your hero to the middle of the map (at the river that is the barrier between Radiant and Dire) and wait for the creeps to come.
Enter the command ‘exec_async perftest’ to run tests.

Performance test with Lobby bot

Create a new lobby with the ‘New Lobby’ option in the menu.
Make sure the “Enable Cheat” and “Fill bots in Empty Slots” options are on.
Choose any hero, and level up any skill.
Run your hero to the middle of the map (at the river that is the barrier between Radiant and Dire) and wait for the creeps to come.
Enter the command ‘exec_async perftest’ to run tests.

3. Summarizing the results of the performance test

After the results of this performance test are obtained, it is time to interpret the meaning of the test results so that you can find out what you have to tweak to get the best performance.

Make sure command line which is in the test matches what you entered in the launch options. If not, maybe you want to check the options again.
Make sure Rendering System according to what you want. There are 3 rendering systems in this game, namely DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan.
Make sure Driver Name shows the GPU you really want to use. Usually games are accidentally run with the wrong GPU, especially on laptop users who often have two GPUs in the form of Intel and Nvidia / AMD.
For Windows 10 users, make sure Windows DVR turn off. Windows DVR is known to damage the performance of this game. Therefore, when it is not needed, it is better to turn it off.

Comparing FPS results from performance tests

If the FPS Half Resolution is much higher than the Baseline Resolution, you may want to reduce your Screen rendering with the option Video> Game Screen Render Quality
If the FPS on Reduced Drawing is much higher than the Baseline Resolution. Means you have to turn off the option High Quality Water and lower Shadow Quality in games.
If the FPS on Particle Disabled is much higher than the Baseline Resolution, you may want to lower Effects Quality in the game in the hope of getting better performance.
If the FPS of Game Only is much higher than the Baseline Resolution, then you may want to turn off the option High Quality UI on games.

Here is some of what Wykrhm wrote in his guide. To read in more detail you can read here.

For the record, this performance test of course won’t work 100% for everyone and yes, basically you have to reduce the graphics quality in the game. At least with the results of this performance test you can know what settings really drain the FPS in the game.

In the end, the FPS problem that many complain about today is due to optimization problems after migrating from the old Source Engine to Source Engine 2, not to mention the increasing number of visual effects and new cosmetic items that make the game not fully optimized by the developer. We still have to wait for a patch from Valve for this performance issue. At least the existence of this guide written by Wykrhm is a temporary solution that can be done to overcome the FPS problem that has been getting crazier in this game since DOTA 2 turned to Source Engine 2.