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Benchmarking DX11 vs Vulkan Performance: November 19, 2025 Update
CS:GO

Benchmarking DX11 vs Vulkan Performance: November 19, 2025 Update

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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
  • GPU Driver Version: 581.57

Benchmark Results

Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19cLHgmX69KVP8WM42zTp8cQv2Nbkl4RMQVunovOrlvs
– Mean DX11 Average FPS: 732.3 (Standard Deviation: 11.73)
– Mean DX11 1% FPS: 198.46 (Standard Deviation: 7.07)
– Mean Vulkan Average FPS: 706.09 (Standard Deviation: 1.78)
– Mean Vulkan 1% FPS: 193.2 (Standard Deviation: 5.94)

Discussion

This stability update was likely for Vulkan, as DX11 actually had higher variance for me this update while Vulkan went down either a little bit in the case of 1% lows or a LOT in the case of average fps. Vulkan's 1% lows are now 97 to 98 percent of DX11's results on my machine, a massive course correction compared to the devastating losses in stability in the November 13 update. While DX11's average FPS has increased its gap from Vulkan's, it did so at the cost of massive variances in FPS; the standard deviation of Vulkan's average FPS shows that Vulkan is way more stable than DX11. Valve will not drop DX11 on CS2 for a long time due to DX11 being able to support older hardware that can't run modern versions of Vulkan, but this shows to me that they care about making Vulkan be the best it can be, even if it will take forever due to Valve time.