Having a Loaded Dota 2 Inventory Might be Tanking Your FPS: New vs Old Account

If you have noticed that your Dota 2 game does not feel as smooth as before, well you may not be the only one. Recently an issue has come to light within the community, highlighting a significant different in FPS (Frames Per Second) on a new Dota 2 account compared to an old one.

Reddit user 'Kuroyukihime1' took to Reddit on 4^th April to share a screenshot showing a comparison between the FPS obtained in Dota 2 on a new account and an old account while sitting idle in the mid lane. 

The result of this experiment? Over a 67% increase in FPS on the new Dota 2 account.

Delving further into the topic, it seems that this problem has plagued Valve games for almost a decade and multiple reports of such incidents have been recorded in the past.

A New Dota 2 Account May Give Higher FPS Than an Old Account: Valve to Blame?

A public post on Reddit has sparked a widespread discussion in the Dota 2 community about the swing difference in FPS between an old and new account, when tested under the same environment.

• Intel Arc A770 Graphics

• Same Dota 2 Settings

• Sitting Idle in Mid Lane

The result of this experiment was as follows,

• Old Dota 2 Account: Average of 118 FPS

• New Dota 2 Account: Average of 197 FPS

• Difference in Average FPS: 79 FPS

This huge difference in FPS between the two Dota 2 accounts was staggering and prompted many in the community to question what might be causing this issue while also requesting Valve to look into it. 

Jeff Hill, Senior Software Engineer at Valve, stumbled upon this post and was left flabbergasted at the stark difference in frame rate which compelled him to state, “Oh wow, that's not a small difference at all! If you could collect an ETL file (Event Trace Log) while idling on the new account and the normal account and share them that would be super helpful."

For anyone wondering, ETL is used to extract data and combine them, which are used by organizations to analyze the details in depth.

Furthermore, Reddit user Kuroyukihime1 also linked older community posts on Reddit from over seven to nine years ago that reported similar incidents in CS:GO.

These former posts claim that having a larger armory in-game was giving players a lower FPS and this problem did not seem to exist on a new account, providing a significant boost in terms of frame rate.

Naturally, since Dota 2 and CS:GO are both built on the Source Engine, they assumed the problem falls in the proprietary game engine being used, previously Source 1 and currently Source 2.

So what can you do as players to gain better FPS in Dota 2? If you want a smoother experience but do not want to create a new account, you can try to remove custom terrains and play the game in mid-to-high settings to balance out the quality/performance ratio.

Otherwise create a new account and go gun-ho on your opponents unless Valve awakens from its almost decade old slumber to finally take care of this rather problematic issue!