Dota 2 on Mac: Benchmarks & How to Download (2024)

In spite of struggling to surpass League of Legends, Dota 2 remains one of the biggest games in the world. It’s often in the Top 3 “most played” games on Steam. That’s right, in spite of being 6 years old now, the free-to-play MOBA from Valve is stronger than ever. In fact, Dota 2 is currently the second most-played game in the world, with over 600,000 peak concurrent players in the past 24 hours.

But can you play Dota 2 on Mac? How good is its native version? Can it run on M1 Macs?

Can you play Dota 2 on Mac?

You can absolutely play Dota 2 on your Mac, and that includes Intel and Apple Silicon Models. In fact, Dota 2 is one of the few games to fully utilize the Vulkan and MoltenVK APIs in order to offer superior performance on macOS.

Dota 2 is not a particularly demanding game, but that shouldn’t take merit away from Valve, who made significant strides in using the Vulkan graphics API (which is not officially supported on macOS) to offer improved performance. When they moved from OpenGL to Vulkan, the game saw over a 50% increase in performance, according to Valve:

Bottom line: Dota 2 runs smoothly on modern Macs, including MacBook Airs and Mac Minis. We have real-world benchmarks on Apple Silicon and Intel machines to share below.

Art	Game	Genre	64-bit?	64-bit	API	M1 Support
	Dota 2	MOBA	Yes		Vulkan	Rosetta

Dota 2 on Mac: Everything you need to know

The sequel to the infamous mod, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), Dota 2 pits two teams of five players against each other. Each team has to defend its own base while trying to destroy the enemy’s base.

You’re in control of a “hero” with unique abilities, and with more than one hundred to choose from, mastering your hero while playing as a team is a real challenge. This explains why MOBAs are so hard to master and why their community is so demanding (and borderline abusive with beginners).

It may not be as big as League of Legends, and Heroes of the Storm is still my personal favorite, but Dota 2 is still one of the best MOBAs you can play. With a 90 Metascore and 85% Positive reviews on Steam from over a million gamers, you can’t go wrong here.

Dota 2 Mac requirements

These are the game’s official Mac requirements:

⚠️ Note that these requirements do not mention Apple Silicon Macs, but we can confirm that M1 machines are perfectly capable of running Dota 2.

How to play Dota 2 on Mac

As mentioned before, Dota 2runs natively on Mac, and that includes Intel-based and M1 Macs.

The game does require Rosetta 2 to run on Apple Silicon Macs. But Rosetta 2 works so seamlessly (it installs automatically the first time it detects an Intel-based app), and it integrates so well with macOS, that the experience is virtually the same as running a native Apple Silicon Mac.

This means Dota 2 can run on macOS without requiring any third-party software. Therefore, we won’t waste your time talking about Parallels, Crossover (both excellent tools, but only useful for Windows-exclusive games…), or Streaming services.

Also, as you can see from the low system requirements, Dota 2 isn’t a demanding game by any means. Requiring merely an Intel HD 3000 means any modern Mac should be able to run it without breaking a sweat.

That said, for a long time, gamers complained on Reddit that it was hard to get a smooth and consistent experience. We take it for a spin to see how it really runs on macOS.

Can your Mac run Dota 2? Benchmarks!

These are the Dota 2 M1 benchmarks we have gathered so far:

As a reminder, this is how we describe the different levels of performance:

• Below 20 FPS: Unplayable: Laggy gameplay, full of stutters and slowdowns.
• 20-30 FPS: Borderline: Can be OK in slow-paced games. Still, not optimal.
• 30-45 FPS: Playable: Acceptable for most (most gaming consoles do this).
• 45-60 FPS: Smooth: Fluid gameplay, with no perceivable stutters.
• 60+ FPS: Very Smooth: For hardcore and professional players, a luxury for most.

Intel benchmarks

We tested Dota 2 on the following machine:

• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2016): 2.0 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM,Intel Iris Graphics 540 (1.5GB)

This Mac should be a fair compromise as it remains a modest machine because of its integrated graphics, but it’s still one of the most recent Intel MacBook Pros out there.

We tested the game on 1280×800 and Medium settings using the Exclusive Fullscreen option (which results in much better graphics and performance):

We ran tests using both the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering API.

Using the still standard OpenGL option, our MacBook Pro runs the game at an average 51,8 FPS (frames per second), which is more than enough for most:

Be aware that FPS can significantly drop when several heroes get into a fight simultaneously. For that reason, it’s better to run the game using modest settings for an overall acceptable experience.

We did run the game using the Vulkan API (which you need to install before running the game) and found it to be as fast but more stable. In other words, we experienced a similar 50 FPS on average performance, but the drops were less pronounced.

Bottom line: If you own a recent Mac, you should be able to easily run Dota 2 on Medium settings. And remember, the game is free-to-play so it can’t hurt to try it for yourself!

Dota 2 Mac download

Dota 2 is a free-to-play game that is exclusively available on Steam.