Now it's the Green Team's turn for our gauntlet of Dota 2 render tests! As a reminder, we performed the exact same test for NVIDIA as we did for AMD and used as many constants as Dota 2 allows. Given how random Dota 2 can actually be, we had to perform a Bot match to reduce random occurrences. That being said, on with the show!

As the graph clearly shows, the GTX 1060 puts up some great numbers across all render modes. OpenGL is still the lowest but it still gives a respectable performance with only a 12% loss. The highest, yet again, is DirectX 11 rendering with a second place tie between DirectX 9 and Vulkan. All around, a great showing by Team Green.

It's important to note, NVIDIA didn't seem to suffer the same problems that AMD did on OpenGL visual quality. As you can see below, the images are near identical in quality.

OpenGL Visual Quality

DirectX 11 Visual Quality

Unfortunately for the older GTX 970, it had a worse showing for the OpenGL render mode. With a loss of 21% over the DirectX 11 rendering mode, it clearly is the worse for this previous generation mainstream graphics card. Given NVIDIA's investment into DirectX optimization last generation, we see near identical performance between DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 render modes. And finally, Vulkan barely beats OpenGL with an extra 7 frame average.