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Dota 2 (Vulkan)
Results from our Radeon RX 550 review give us some hint as to what’s playable in Dota 2 under Vulkan. We start using the game’s Medium preset at 1920x1080.
The Radeon and HD Graphics results are slightly higher after updating to the latest drivers. But what we saw before holds true today: the Radeon RX 550 and more powerful RX 460 essentially tie when we’re bound by host processing.
Nvidia tends to fare better in those situations, and indeed three very dissimilar GeForce cards pile up on each other. Yet, they’re about 17% faster than the Radeons (and about 120% quicker than HD Graphics 530—good news for competitive gamers).
Forcing a more taxing graphics workload alleviates some of the bottleneck, allowing these graphics cards to differentiate themselves a bit. The Radeon RX 460 carves out a sizeable advantage over the RX 550, and Nvidia’s GeForce GT 1030 falls well below the GTX 1050 and GTX 950. But the GT 1030 does maintain a 14% lead over its most modern competition from AMD (even if the RX 550 is more expensive).
Strangely, our GeForce GTX 750 Ti locked up every time we tried to run the benchmark sequence under Vulkan. The API is officially supported on Maxwell-based cards, so it’s unclear why our sample struggles.
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