The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) sub-genre of real-time strategy games was virtually created by a Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos mod called Defence Of The Ancients (DotA). We recently ran a performance analysis on Valve's recent entry into the free-to-play MOBA genre: Dota 2 Performance, Benchmarked. You might want to give that article read if you aren't familiar with this style of game. In any case, no MOBA discussion is complete without mentioning League of Legends.

In 2010, my teenage son started talking about a PC game that spread like wildfire through his school, and he spent increasingly large portions of his evening playing it. He began to invite friends over for LAN parties at our house. And while my son's peer group knows PC gaming well, I had never seen them treat it like a team sport before that point. What's more, this title wasn't advertised on television or major media; it was a game that stealthily ate its way into a huge portion of the mainstream through word of mouth. And the free-to-play model certainly helped it gain popularity, especially among teenagers. My son began to request prepaid credit cards as gifts for his birthday so he could buy in-game items. I doubt he's every spent so much on any entertainment experience, despite the misnamed revenue model. That title is none other than League of Legends, abbreviated LoL.

This isn't an isolated tale. Riot Games, LoL's developer, claims more than 12 million players log on every day, with peak concurrent global numbers reaching five million. The game boasts over 70 million registered players, 32 million of which are active every month. By hours, it's the most played video game in the world. Those are staggering figures that World of Warcraft could only hope to catch. At the same time, LoL managed to stay under the radar of mainstream media, for the most part. The first time I mentioned LoL's impact on the gaming world to a colleague, he clearly thought I was off my rocker. How could a game be that popular and maintain a low profile?

LoL had a relatively unchallenged run until the recent release of Dota 2. But after playing both, I can say that LoL is more honed than Valve's upstart entry. As a very inexperienced MOBA player, here are the three main differences that struck me when I tried them, one after the other:

1) You have access to a limited rotation of heroes in LoL. The game lets you save in-game rewards to purchase a hero for permanent access, or you can purchase it instantly with real-world currency. On the other hand, Dota 2 gives all players free access to all heroes.

2) LoL does not allow players to destroy their own assets. Dota 2 does let you wreck your own towers and structures to deny enemies gold rewards.

3) When a player is killed in LoL, they lose only experience. In Dota 2, the killed player loses gold and experience.
These three differences have a significant impact on how each game is played. It's generally accepted that LoL is more accessible to beginners. Having said that, get a lot of practice in bot matches or with experienced friends before joining a pick-up group; the MOBA community is not known for its forgiving attitude. If you screw up, you're sure to receive a volley of unflattering leet-speak. In a MOBA, a mistake means boosting the other team, and that's a sure way to lose.
Successful LoL play involves a lot of practice and learning. Fortunately, it's a lot easier for us to dig into the game's graphics engine and your hardware's performance.
Developed from the ground-up by Riot Games, LoL uses a proprietary game engine intended to facilitate maximum compatibility with a wide range of PC hardware. Instead of getting majorly overhauled, the engine receives small patches to continually improve it. While we've watched visual quality get better since the original release back in 2010, though, it'd be hard to pinpoint the exact changes without side-by-side screenshots. The art style is very similar to the game's spiritual roots in World Of Warcraft III: Reign Of Chaos. The Blizzard influence is obvious, although LoL has more of a cartoonish edge to its models and characters.

Detail settings are controlled by four switches: Character Quality, Effects Quality, Environment Quality, and Shadows. Each of these have five levels of detail: Very Low, Low, Medium, High, and Very High. Since the game tends to be so easy on hardware, we're keeping everything maxed out for our benchmarks except for the Shadows setting, which has the most dramatic effect on frame rates.

For comparison, we captured the difference between each setting below:

Frankly, the difference between the High and Very High Shadows settings are very subtle. Low sticks you with blocky shadows, though they only seem to affect characters, and not the environment. Those bottom-end settings are here for your information only; we didn't find them necessary to use since our most entry-level components were able to handle quite a bit more.
The benchmarks make it clear that LoL isn't a demanding title, so multiple graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire aren't necessary. As a result, the most powerful graphics cards we're testing are the Radeon HD 7950 Boost and GeForce GTX 660 Ti, both of which are far more powerful than what you actually need, even in Eyefinity or Surround.
Speaking of three screens, LoL support this, so we're including benchmarks at 5760x1080. The game does suffer some anomalies on the two surrounding monitors, with units floating rather than displaying movement animation. This doesn't affect game play, though.
We also have multiple CPUs to test, including a mobile AMD A10-4600M (with integrated Radeon HD 7660G) and Intel Core i5-3210M (with integrated HD Graphics 4000).
| Test System | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-3550 (Ivy Bridge) 3.3 GHz Base, 3.7 GHz Turbo Boost | |||||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte Z77X-UP7, LGA 1155, Chipset: Intel Z77 Express | |||||||
| Networking | On-Board Gigabit LAN controller | |||||||
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T | |||||||
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB, 7,200 RPM, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3Gb/s | |||||||
| Power | ePower EP-1200E10-T2 1,200 W, ATX12V, EPS12V | |||||||
| Software and Drivers | ||||||||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 8 | |||||||
| DirectX | DirectX 11.1 | |||||||
| Graphics Drivers | AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta 3 Nvidia GeForce 314.22 Intel Graphics Driver 9.18.10.3071 | |||||||
| Benchmarks | ||||||||
| League Of Legends | Custom THG Benchmark, 60-second Fraps run Practice With Bots, Difficulty: Beginner, Start Bench At 2:00 on Timer, Switch View To Other Teammates Every Five Seconds. | |||||||
Although we're calling these settings "Low Details" for the purpose of comparison, they're actually maxed out in the game, aside from the Shadows preset, which is set to High instead of Very High. As you can see on the previous page, the difference is difficult to see, though it does make a difference to the frame rates. We run this benchmark at 1920x1080.
Keep in mind that all of the following tests are performed on a Core i5-3550-based platform, except for the mobile benchmarks. The Core i5-3210M includes on-die HD Graphics 4000, while the A10-4600M APU features Radeon HD 7660G graphics.

The HD Graphics 4000 engine and Radeon HD 7660G remain above 35 FPS at all times. The discrete Radeon HD 6450 barely falls below 40 FPS. That's a really smooth result for entry-level graphics hardware, particularly considering the detail settings are almost as high as they go.
Nvidia's GeForce 210 struggles. Fortunately, there's plenty of room to pull back on the detail settings. Slide back a bit, and the GeForce 210 has little trouble generating playable performance.

Charting frame rates over time shows how closely the Radeon HD 6450, Radeon HD 7660G, and HD Graphics 4000 perform.

We didn't observe any debilitating stuttering, though the Radeon HD 6450 does exceed 15 ms in our subsequent frame latency variance chart. Much of that has to do with its frame rates being too slow.
The rest of our tests are recorded with every detail setting maxed out, including shadows. Does this affect the cards we've already tested, even at 1680x1050?

All of these discrete GPUs maintain more than 30 FPS.

Charting frame rates over time shows that playing at more than 30 FPS is only a worry for the Radeon HD 6450.

Although our subjective analysis doesn't raise any red flags, AMD's Radeon 6670 DDR3 does exceed 15 ms when we filter out the 95th percentile. The Radeon HD 6450's variance is much more than that. This is particularly problematic in light of the fact that we've seen side-by-side comparisons demonstrating as little as 5 ms variance causing significant issues with smoothness. Naturally, then, we wouldn't recommend running the 6450 at LoL's top detail settings.
With a resolution setting of 1920x1080, do the results change?

Not really, it turns out. The Radeon HD 6450 no longer achieves a minimum of 30 FPS, but all of the other cards sustain frame rates higher than 45 FPS.

Our frame rate over time chart shows that the Radeon HD 6450 only drops below 30 FPS in a focused dip at the end of our benchmark run.

Once again, the Radeon HD 6450 exhibits disturbing frame time variance when we isolate the 95th percentile. The Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 is also a little concerning, given that we've recently seen 5 ms differences that are very clear to the eye.
Unlike Dota 2, LoL exposes triple-monitor resolutions. Support isn't completely perfect, since the outside displays suffer strange animation issues. But it's still helpful to see where other characters are located on the other screens.

Even the GeForce GTX 650 and Radeon HD 7750 have little issue driving three screens at 5760x1080 using LoL's highest available details. Minimum frame rates stay above 45 at all times. Nice.

None of the cards we're testing show any worrisome drops in our frame rate over time chart.

The Radeon HD 7750 comes close, but none of these cards exceed frame time variance in excess of 15 milliseconds. With that said, we know that tighter variances are still easy to see on-screen, so it's probable that those four bottom boards would be distinguishable if you put them all side-by-side.
Lastly, we're testing a handful of CPUs to gauge this title's dependence on platform performance. What does it take to avoid a bottleneck?

Seeing that a dual-core Athlon II X2 260 manages to stay above 90 FPS at all times, it's a safe bet that LoL players don't have much to worry about as far as processor-based limitations are concerned. Any dual-core CPU above 2 GHz is probably a safe bet for smooth frame rates.
Remember that the mobile AMD A10-4600M (2.3 GHz base clock) and Intel's mobile Core i5-3210M (2.5 GHz base clock) are both able to keep frame rates above 35 FPS using weaker on-die graphics engines at this title's highest detail settings and a resolution of 1920x1080.
The free-to-play model relies on as many folks as possible playing a game in order for it to be successful. It's simple math: a certain percentage of people will buy in-game items via micro-transactions. So, the more people you can get to play, the higher your revenues. The folks at Riot Games are well aware of this relationship, and LoL is consequently accessible across a wide range of PC hardware. No doubt, this contributes to LoL's record-breaking popularity.
Even at 1920x1080, dialed in to the game's highest-detail settings and Shadows set to High, LoL runs in excess of 30 FPS on AMD's mobile A10-4600M with integrated Radeon HD 7660G graphics and Intel's Core i5-3210M with HD Graphics 4000. As for the discrete cards, Nvidia's GeForce 210 is the only add-in board that couldn't handle our target. With that said, the GeForce can definitely cope with this title at less demanding settings. The same cannot be said for entry-level hardware and Dota 2.

With the Shadows drop-down set to Very High, a Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 and GeForce GT 630 GDDR5 both provide playable frame rates that exceed a minimum of 45 at 1920x1080. Add two more monitors for a aggregate resolution of 5760x1080 and even the GeForce GTX 650 and Radeon HD 7750 keep frame rates up above 45 FPS.
When it comes to platform performance, the game is even less picky. We expect any dual-core processor above 2.0 GHz to handle it with ease.

So, how about the epic battle between LoL and Dota 2? Put simply, Dota 2 looks better, but requires more graphics and processing horsepower. On the other hand, LoL's graphics don't look as good, though you're able to run the title with less-advanced hardware. Put into perspective, when Dota 2 is set to that title's lowest detail settings, its frame rates are comparable to LoL's at its highest. Dota 2 won't run smoothly on an entry-level card like the GeForce 210 at 1920x1080, whereas LoL's options can be dropped far enough to accommodate the low-end stuff.
Anyone who has a dedicated gaming machine should find that both of these popular MOBA games are easy to run at high resolutions and settings.
And if you're a League of Legends player looking for some friendly competition from your fellow Tom’s Hardware LoLers, head to our League of Legends intro thread on our forums and post your username and a quick hello! See you in-game!