Jeff Hill responded to Dota 2 performance complaint

I'm a developer on the Dota team and I've been largely focused on performance recently. We haven't done a blog post or other messaging about it yet, but we've been shipping regular performance improvements between major patches. When major updates ship, and we've shipped two pretty big ones recently (7.29 and NPX), there are bugs which often include performance regressions. That said, I can tell you that developers on both the Dota team and the engine team are working hard to try to improve performance on Dota and that it's important that Dota run acceptably well on laptops and non-gaming PCs. A 5 year old gaming PC is a fine machine and should be able to run Dota smoothly with no problems on reasonable settings, so clearly something has broken.
 
The client now reports the current frame rate to the server with every UserCmd packet, which we then store in the replay. If you run the client with -dev on the command line, you can see the frame times for all the players in the stats dropdown. This has been helpful in finding situations that cause a client to have frame stalls. We recently used it to discover that rendering the box shadows for Panorama UI panels was sometimes very slow and this could cause a stall when changing unit selection. As a result, a box shadow rendering code rewrite shipped with the NPX update, along with some other portrait model creation changes, and now selection changing is faster on average and much better in the worst cases.
 
An important thing we've found recently is that the DX9 rendering pipeline isn't performing well, specifically on the first frame of Sand King's Sandstorm or Crystal Maiden's Freezing Field. Both of these effects cause the driver to load a new FX sprite shader configuration, which appears to cause the driver to stall during the first frame it sees that. We're working to try to track down the root cause of the problem and find a solution, but in general if possible it's best to use the DX11 or Vulkan rendering APIs.
 
We track global metrics on client and server performance (new as of this year) on average frame rate during gameplay, frame stalls and which code subsystems are using time. From those metrics globally, I know that the average frame rate for a Dota player is 60fps+, with 95%+ of players hitting 30fps or better. I can also tell you that the client performance on average hasn't regressed for many Dota players with these updates. We are still working on finding and fixing frame stalls, because the same metrics suggest we still have too many outlier frames.