What we need to know is what fps is the game played at professionally. for example at what fps will the game be played without a competitive advantage. THAT is the question we need answered. we know we can play the game at 60 fps but will playing it at 240 fps will make you win somehow?

If you have a 240 Hz monitor? There would definitely be an advantage then, in the form of both smoother visuals over time and more up-to-date info being available to the player at any given moment. If you have a 60 Hz monitor? Probably not.

FPS figures beyond the refresh rate of your monitor will not make much difference. But there still may, possibly, arguably, in some situations, perhaps be a minuscule advantage to that---in the sense that each screen refresh has a chance to provide an ever-so-slightly more recently rendered frame.

For more information on this topic, I'd recommend reading the text above the 'Minimum Settings Chart' in our CS:GO guide.

planning on getting a 240hz 1920x1080 monitor but wondering if my pc would ever get to that fps. i7 10700 32gb ram rtx 3080. i think my cpu bottlenecks it.. i read somewhere dota is a cpu intensive game..

You don't need to consistently exceed 240 FPS for that monitor choice to make sense. You would benefit from having that monitor with any frame rate above ~144 FPS. And as it happens, we would expect that machine to regularly provide 200+ FPS in DotA 2 at 1080p (though not usually 240+ FPS, at least at max settings).

Hello Daniel, awesome guide, very detailed and well written!

I'm looking to build a pc with an intel CPU and an nvidia gpu card. i play on 1080p, and graphic settings on high (with most of the aspects such as high quality water as off). My main issue is teamfights in dota, i can have 120fps during the start of the game, but drop to around 20fps in teamfights where things get really messy. What CPU and GPU combination will allow me to have a low 1% and low 0.1% framerate thats above 60fps?

While I would be interested to know the CPU and GPU of your current system, in general anything at least as powerful as the 'Modest' tier of our general build recommendation chart (which only features an i5-10400 and a GTX 1650) ought to satisfy your requirements for the build just fine.

Current build is

CPU: intel i3-4170 (3.7GHz)
GPU: Nvidia GTX 950

RAM: 8GB single stick

Thats assuring, Ive read everywhere that dota is single core CPU heavy game and GPU isn't the bottleneck. Having a high clock speed is important with a dual stick RAM. Based on this information i thought i'd come to you for advice on limiting the low framerates during teamfights and keeping the game above 60fps at all times.

Ah, I see. Yes, I'm quite certain it's the CPU holding that particular build back in Dota 2 performance. For example, even the (now three-generations-old) i5-10400 I mentioned in my previous comment is nearly 40% more powerful than the i3-4170.

May I know you recommendation of PC spec to play and live stream 1440p Dota 2 @ 144 fps+/-？
(Prefer AMD CPU)

Well, that does depend on the settings for the stream upload (bitrate, resolution, frame rate), but in theory anything at least at the level of the 'Outstanding' tier of our general build recommendation chart should be fully capable of running the game at 1440p with max settings and 144+ FPS while also streaming.

Excellent article Daniel.
Sadly i require the portability of Laptops, or else I would build one.
What gaming laptops would you recommend under $1200 to play Dota 2 on high settings? (the cheaper the better)

While we don't usually cover laptops on our site (since we have such a focus on building), we did recently publish a blog post with a few select recommendations you could consider. The cheapest one there is well below your requested budget, and should handle DotA 2 on high just fine.

Hi Daniel, great article. I'm at a bit of a crossroads and would love your opinion.

I have had the same GPU for a number of years, and recently did a system rebuild reusing the same GPU. My current build is;

CPU: i7 10700k
GPU: ASUS GTX 1070
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance 3200
MOBO: EVGA Z490
PSU: Corsair SF750
HDD: M.2 Corsair MP500

I recently purchased a 27GN950 4k monitor capable of running at 144Hz.

Currently with my GTX 1070, I'm looking at anywhere between 100-130 fps on Ultra settings in Dota. I'm looking to get the full 144hz experience in 4K on dota. When I check my system monitor, the CPU is at like 20% utilisation and the GPU is at 100%.

Do you think a EVGA 3070 Ultra will get me this? What type of Ultra settings 4k fps performance would adding a GPU like that to my system could I expect? If not, what GPU do you think will get me 144 fps consistent in 4k without being wasteful?

Example GPU: https://www.mwave.com.au/pr...

An RTX 3070 (like the one you linked) would bring that whole build up to roughly the level of the current 'Outstanding' tier of our general build recommendation chart, so yes, we would expect your system with that GPU to be capable of consistently providing 144-200 FPS in DotA 2 at 4K with max settings.

Amazing, thanks for the reply.

Hi, I'm looking at purchasing a new laptop for basic home browsing, movie-streaming, and Dota 2 playing usage.

I'm currently looking at 2 options (hope the links below work for anyone who's looking, please let me know if they dont'. Thanks!):

1. S$1,175.68 (Singapore dollars)
https://www.amazon.sg/HP-Pa...

2. S$1,295.76
https://www.newegg.com/glob...

Can any one advise
1. Which is the better choice, considering the specs and slight price difference?
2. Can either or both of them play Dota 2 at 1080p at 60fps at Max (Best Looking) or High (1 notch to the left) video settings?

Thanks in advance!
Frankie

1. The Asus laptop is definitely the better choice for a gaming machine. This is because, although both laptops have the same CPU and 8GB of RAM, the GTX 1660 Ti GPU in the Asus option should be over 60% more powerful than the GTX 1650 GPU in the HP.

2. That said, either of those options should be capable of providing 60+ FPS in Dota 2 at 1080p with max settings, as (when plugged in) those HP and Asus laptops would roughly correspond to the performance of the 'Modest' and 'Good' tiers of our main build chart, respectively.

Hi, Daniel.

Currently, I have a PC built with the following spec:

CPU: Xeon E3-1220v2

Motherboard: Z77 Extreme 4

GPU: Gigabyte GTX970 OC

RAM: 2 x 8GB Kingmax DDR3 1600Mhz

Hard disk: WD 1TB 7200 rpm

SSD: Adata XPG 8200 Pro 500GB

PSU: Corsair 650 non-modular (second-hand)

May i know what's my tier for my PC? Any upgrade can be applied to my current build if i want to achieve constant 144fps in 2K resolution? Thanks in advance!!

Theoretically, the most painless way to upgrade a PC for gaming is to upgrade just the graphics card, as GPUs share compatibility across all motherboards from the past couple decades. But as the CPU is already the bottleneck in your system---whose graphics card is comparable to an RX 570---upgrading the GPU would be unlikely to yield desirable results. To get better FPS, you'd probably need to upgrade your CPU (and thus your motherboard and RAM as well, for compatibility).

(Moreover, in regard to your later comment: operating your DDR3 RAM at a slightly higher speed would also be unlikely to yield a noticeable improvement to game performance, unfortunately. And Xeon processors are locked, which makes overclocking difficult and minimally effective.)

Thanks for reply, Daniel. I'm also thinking about changing my CPU too because I found that my CPU was struggling when running the android emulator. Any motherboard of B550 series which has extra PCIE slot for my present wifi card is recommended for Ryzen5 3600?

Actually I was wondering how the thing affects the RAM's selection if I want to build a new PC. Are they restrict by Motherboard or CPU default supported frequency?

As long as you're getting a B550 motherboard, an R5 3600, and DDR4 RAM, there should be no problem. All recent motherboards are compatible with standard DIMM DDR4 RAM. You will likely be limited to the max stated RAM frequency for the motherboard, but that tends to be quite high.

It is comparable to the "Modest" tier. The CPU isn't capable of 144fps, while the GPU is capable of it on Medium. I would recommend upgrading to the R5 3600, B450/B550 mainboard and 3200 MHz RAM. If you play on Ultra you would also have to upgrade the GPU.

Thanks for reply. is the RAM speed can be overclock due to the motherboard or CPU? Any noticeable different if RAM overclocked higher than the frequency of CPU supported? Plus, is RTX2060super able to handle the game constant 144fps in 2K resolution Ultra setting?

The 2060 Super will manage 144fps.
The motherboard limits the maximum RAM speed, while the memory controller on the CPU can limit the data throughput. On the Intel side only Z chipsets support frequencies over 2933 MHz, while on the AMD side almost almost all boards support much higher frequencies.
Good B550 boards: GIGABYTE B550M DS3H, ASROCK B550M PRO4, GIGABYTE B550M AORUS PRO, ASROCK B550 PRO4, MSI PRO B550-A PRO

A lot of thanks for your valuable information.😍

Hi Daniel! First, thanks for all the work thats gone into this website. Im looking to play dota on a 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor, that reliably hits 144-165fps. Given your scale only goes to 'Silky Smooth'/90fps+, what do you think itll take to hit my target? Thanks again!

Ha, thanks, but I should clarify it's not just me! I didn't have any hand in creating the article above, for instance. I just spend the most time in these comment sections. But we're actually a small team all working hard on the site!

Anyway, to your specific question: it's a bit tough to give precise recommendations for 1440p ultra widescreen, as reliable benchmarks are few and far between. But 3440x1440 is much closer to 1440p than it is to 4K, so it should be effective to just aim for your desired stats at 1440p and then push the hardware up a notch or two from there. This thought process would point in the direction of something like the 'Outstanding' tier of our general build recommendation chart.

I see! I wish you all great success with the website :) Thanks for your response - Ive taken this on board with my decision making (and used LI's build recommendation chart for other parts of the build too!), however, I think Im going to go with the 5700 xt as it seems to be of great value, and my search for dota benchmarking has netted ambiguous/limited data to justify spending more money on Nvidia cards.

Well, that's only down one tier from 'Outstanding,' so that would've been our recommendation for standard 1440p 144fps anyway, and may hopefully serve your purposes just fine!

To clarify, Im talking maximum settings.

Hi Daniel , so I need at least $1000 to get a good pc to play dota 2 professionally?

No, definitely not! Dota 2 is a somewhat old and very well-optimized title, so great framerates are possible even with lower midrange machines. You'll notice that we actually tag any 90+ FPS cell in the performance chart above as being "For hardcore and professional players," and at 1080p that includes the 'Entry' tier of our general build recommendation chart, which costs about $430. And even then, most competitive players don't play with max graphical settings---which means that the 'Entry' tier would get even higher framerates for them.

DX9 appears to deliver the highest average FPS, although DX11 and OpenGL are very close behind: https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Hello Daniel,what do you say about this pc,is it good for dota 2:
Processor: Intel i3 530 @3GHz
RAM: 4GB DDR3 @1333MHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55
Graphic Card: ASUS RX550 2GB GDDR5
PSU: Gembird 600W Real Power
HDD: Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm 32mb cache
OS: Windows 10 Professional

Hmm, that's a tough call, as that is fairly unbalanced PC. While the RX 550 is roughly on-par with the Vega 11 iGPU in the 'Minimum' tier of our general build recommendation chart, the i3-350M is only about half as powerful as the Athlon 200GE in the lowest, 'Destitute' tier of that same linked chart. As a result, we may reasonably guess (or hope) that the overall performance of that PC in gaming would be similar to the 'Poor' tier; if that is correct, then it should be able to run Dota 2 with 30-45 FPS at 1080p (or maybe better with reduced settings and/or resolution).

woOoAh! Hi Daniel, this discussion satisfies my level of understanding regarding graphics.
I have recently bought my CPU together with its monitor and seems it has a built-in GPU within.

1) motherboard H110m-d
2) i3-7100 dual core
3) monitor is HP V203p 19.5inch having a 1440x900 @ 60Hz
4) 4GB RAM (there still available slot for additional ram)

I planned to buy the jetstream 1060 vcard but i have a thought that it might be overkill for a low CPU i picked,
So i paid for a
"NVIDIA PALIT STORM GTX 1050ti 4gb 128bit" .

as of now, the GPU ordered still not in my hand.

I would like to hear your advice if this combinations can make my dota2 in high or even ultra setting.
I am not a techie person and also have a shallow understanding regarding gadgets.

Thanks in advance!

Yes, that should work well. A PC with an i3-7100 and a GTX 1050 Ti would be roughly comparable to the 'Modest' tier of our general build recommendation chart, which we would expect to be capable of over 90 FPS in Dota 2 at 900p with maximum settings.

Hi Daniel,

Good day!

I just got my 1050ti installed to my i3-7th gen 1440x900 monitor.
I used to set the quality to ultra having an all on/full option on video quality.

I only got a 30-60fps,
yah i could play ultra mode smoothly but somehow can feel that little delay on movement(like no dr on dota1)

I got 150-180 on med setting

and a 240 on low setting.

Is there a way to play ultra and fully eliminate that little delays in hero movement?(its not lag but can feel that delay compared to med setting).
What i mean is, is there a category which can be sacrificed(off/decreased) that is related to that delay?

Please need your suggestion.

Thanks once again!

Oh i just got a back-read on this blog... Ill try those indicated above, thanks!

well if u have time have to ask at you about some configuration still in use for play in our "team":
1)Intel q9300 (yes, i know :) ) at stock 2.5 ghz, 5 gb ram @ 800 mhz, gtx 760 2gb;
2)Fx 8350, 8gb ram, gtx 1060 6gb,ssd;
3) Intel g 3220, asus h81m-e, 8 gb ram, hdd, gtx 670 2gb phantom;
4)FX 6350, 10gb ram, gtx 760 2gb, ssd;

Most of problems come from the intel q9300, cannot mantain 50 stable fps (think "for sure, it's obvious") at 720p resolution.
It's fun to see how muh old hardware pc can go ahead, that's why i decide to write here to ask for any opionion u could give me.

Many thanks

We are happy to provide advice, but I would need to know specifically what you want advice about.

Are there plans to upgrade one or more of these systems, and you want to know how to go about that? Do you just want to know which of them is theoretically the best, or the worst, or the most balanced, or the least balanced? Do you have a budget in mind for upgrades, or for a new system for a team member, and want to know which parts to get with it?

I would like to ask you in wich tier they will be comparable and about balancing.
About upgrades, well are all system recycled from other, used parts not in use or something like that, so i don't have a lot of money to spend on them. Last updgrade i've done is a gtx 1060 6gb used for the fx 8320E, i know it willbe bottlenecked by cpu but come at a good price and should be ok for dota 2 and similar.
Await your precious tips!

Thank you very much for your time Daniel

Best regards

Alright, here are the tiers of our primary build recommendation chart that are closest in performance to each of the core components of the builds listed in your first comment:

1) CPU: (over 60% worse than) Destitute / GPU: Modest
2) CPU: Destitute / GPU: Very Good
3) CPU: (over 30% worse than) Destitute / GPU:Modest
4) CPU: Destitute / GPU: Modest

So all four of them are significantly imbalanced, with much better GPUs than CPUs. It's fair to say that any of those graphics cards should be capable of 60+ FPS in Dota 2 with maximum settings at 1080p, if they had balanced CPUs to support them.

In fact, any of those four builds is susceptible to a ~$250 upgrade (of CPU, motherboard, and RAM) that could provide enough performance to consistently get 90+ FPS in Dota 2 at max settings. All you would have to do is make use of the CPU, motherboard, and RAM from at least the 'Entry' tier of the linked build chart. There would still be imbalances, but they would be so minor as to be unnoticeable or even irrelevant (except for (2), where the GTX 1060 6GB may still be noticeably bottlenecked).

Ok, understand Daniele. So even the FX series cannot mantain 60+ fps during dota gameplay, or it can still match some results ?
Thank you very much again!

FX-series chips can theoertically hit 60+ FPS in Dota 2, but it would have to be below max settings (maybe even at minimum settings) and it would have to be below 1080p (i.e. 900p or 720p).

Ok, thank you very much Daniel, i will make some ingame tests and maybe i can let you know if anyone is interested in.
I saw some tests and benchmark in some youtube channel, maybe with FX still can handle the hurt of the new dota sourse engine 2 with some graphic option turned to off. Obiously, the q9300 still not be a nice idea to get ahead.
I did not find any cpu benchmark updated anywhere (2018 at least) so i cannot have an idea how these cpu can work in 2019.

WOW thanks for all that, very well done!

Hello I want to get a laptop to play Dota 2 on high or ultra settings , is this one good enough or I need a better graphic card

7th-Gen Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, up to 3.8GHz (Boost clock)
Portable gaming performance with GTX 1050 4GB graphics
120Hz 15.6” Full HD Wideview display.
ASUS AURA 4-zone RGB Gaming Keyboard. Scar Edition design with kevlar pattern on palm rest.
128GB PCIEG3x4 NVME SSD OS Drive + 1TB FireCuda Hybrid Data Drive; 8GB DDR4 RAM
Comprehensive connectivity with 2x2 802.11ac, USB 3.1 Type-C, HDMI 1.4,

That one should be good enough. In particular, that laptop is roughly comparable to the 'Modest' tier of our general build recommendation chart, which we would expect to be capable of 90+ FPS in Dota 2 at 1080p with maximum in-game settings.