The Dota 2 client has an ominous switch "-high" that is supposed to give higher CPU priority to the Operation System to enable better performance. We wanted to put this setting to the test and see if it actually helped us at all. Remember, we are running all these tests with the Intel i7-6700k which in most cases, it and the i7-7700k provide some of the high framerates possible. Because of this, we also included a series of tests with the same graphics cards and the AMD FX-8350 to simulate budget processors with weaker IPC per single thread.

As you can see, the "-high" priority CPU flag actually caused performance loss on the NVIDIA side and provided a marginal benefit to the AMD graphics side. We would honestly consider the AMD gain to be a margin of error and speculate a zero performance gain in general.

Seeing how this option was probably intended for lower end CPUs that need better priority focus for processing, we include a lower end CPU that has less IPC per single thread. For this job, we selected our AMD FX-8350 codenamed StormTrooper and performed the same laning and test cycle as previously defined.

Looking at the results, it doesn't seem to have any impact on performance even for our weaker FX-8350 processor. I have to wonder if this is helpful for an older dual core system like the Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2? Regardless, this option didn't provide any real measurable benefit and it shouldn't be used.