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Benchmarking DX11 vs Vulkan Performance: May 22, 2026 Build
CS:GO

Benchmarking DX11 vs Vulkan Performance: May 22, 2026 Build

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Previous update’s results can be seen here

Benchmark template spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hnERNVvrv8lJfkAZtgE4V0afo90bh0_zPrX4Ep7aJZI/

Please put (or edit) your results here: https://forms.gle/mv3DW6MtDcnJNN3h6

Users’ results can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17gsJtW5QrcSMNCbyQbIt09XlOusrvIluS_8Esg0S6s4/

Purpose of Benchmarking

To my understanding, Valve intends to eventually drop DX11 support in one of their in-development games: Deadlock (source). Because Deadlock doesn’t have a benchmark map or program, I decided that the next best option would be to benchmark CS2 in both DX11 and Vulkan every time an update has anything related to performance improvements in the changelogs.
The goal is to document if any improvements or regressions have occurred in Vulkan or DX11 performance in CS2, and to see if this could indicate any progress towards a full transition to Vulkan in later Source 2 games. A link to the template spreadsheet can be seen above, and my benchmarking results will be provided below along with a commentary.

My Non-Game Specs

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
  • GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070 Ti
  • Operating System: Windows 11 25H2
  • GPU Driver Version: 610.47

Benchmark Results

Link:
– Mean DX11 Average FPS: 907.55 (Standard Deviation: 8.55)
– Mean DX11 1% FPS: 255.83 (Standard Deviation: 4.32)
– Mean Vulkan Average FPS: 812.93 (Standard Deviation: 6.28)
– Mean Vulkan 1% FPS: 238.42 (Standard Deviation: 10.16)

Discussion

Unless Valve secretly put in massive Vulkan optimizations in the span of a week, Nvidia's new drivers have massively improved performance for both DX11 and Vulkan while also allowing Vulkan to catch up to DX11 in performance. Vulkan's average and 1% lows are higher than DX11's former average and 1% lows, but the standard deviation of Vulkan's 1% lows has shot up to its highest value ever, so hopefully that can be fixed. This corrects my former belief that it was on Valve. I'd love to see if Nvidia can do even more to help make Vulkan a great option on Windows.