Popular MOBA game Dota 2 runs fairly smoothly on today’s standard hardware. But with detailed animations and particle effects from Arcana, Immortal and other lavish cosmetics and skins, the game’s frame rate can suffer and become unpredictable. Here’s what you can do to make the game running as smooth and stable as possible.
Set a target FPS range in Dota 2
Set a target FPS (Frames Per Second) range for your gaming experience. Ideally, you should aim to maintain a stable frame rate that ensures complete immersion in game. That means avoiding disruptions and stuttering in the game.
For an experience akin to the competitive gaming scene, your target should be a consistently high frame rate, such as 144 frames per second. Even if you have a gaming setup on the lower to mid-range side, it is still possible to achieve a decent gaming experience by maintaining around 60 FPS.

Set every Dota 2 setting to the lowest option possible
To optimize your Dota 2 gaming experience, start by setting all graphics options to their lowest settings. Then, incrementally increase these settings one by one, aiming to strike the right balance between performance and visual quality. While you can play with the lowest settings for the best performance, it can compromise visual clarity and make it harder to distinguish in-game elements. Your goal is to achieve your desired frame rate (FPS) while maximizing graphic detail for an enjoyable experience.
There are non-essential settings in Dota 2 that you can turn off. You will hardly notice the effect on gameplay with these settings disabled, but you will gain a boost in graphics performance. These settings are Atmospheric Fog, World Lighting, and Ambient Creatures. Is the improvement still not enough? Turn off Specular and High Quality Water. The game will be noticeably less appealing but still passable.
The setting called Game Screen Render Quality has one of the highest impacts on frame rates. If set to the rightmost position, you achieve the sharpest quality but at a huge cost in performance. If you can tolerate the blurriness, set the slider around 80 percent for a boost in FPS.

While you’re still experimenting, consider switching your rendering API to Vulkan; some players vouch for its performance benefits. However, it’s important to note that your experience may vary, as not all hardware may fully support Vulkan. You can always switch back to your previous rendering API if things get messy.
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Expect major FPS drops in the heat of a team fight
Decreasing frame rates become most evident during team clashes, as players duke it out and use their items and abilities. This often involves a variety of the visual effects that may strain your hardware, possibly resulting in disruptive stuttering that is jarring enough to affect you and your team’s performance.
When you tinker with the graphics settings, make sure they are finely tuned to handle the demanding load of team fights.
Minimize external factors
Factors outside the Dota 2 game settings can also affect the FPS. If you’re gaming on a laptop, for example, switch from battery-saver mode to performance mode and confirm that the game is utilizing the discrete graphics card rather than the integrated one. Features like Steam Overlay can also impact your gaming experience, so disable the ones you can live without.
If none of these tips work to improve your Dota 2 FPS, maybe it’s time to consider upgrading your computer. Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments and we’ll add it to the article.