When the Source 2 version of Dota 2 arrived there was much rejoicing, for even though the client was buggy and Rubick messed up the performance was greatly improved across the board. However, as further updates rolled out the Dota 2 client slowly but surely started getting less stable. Eventually this resulted in unusual framerate drops during high-intensity fights even on beastly rigs, a general reduction in framerate for lower-end machines, and a variety of other minor annoyances.

Well, if you're one of those affected by these problems you'll be glad to hear that Valve has just released a massive patch aimed solely at improving client performance! There are no specific patch notes to list out, so here's Valve's message that came with the announcement:

"No matter which aspect of Dota captures your interest, all players benefit from improvements in the performance of the game client. With that in mind, today’s update delivers multiple changes focused on providing smooth and consistent gameplay regardless of the hardware setup you’re running.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve released many small incremental updates aimed at improving client performance. In today’s update, we’re releasing many more fixes that will also improve overall performance and FPS stability. Specifically, low-end machines will see a higher peak frame rate, while high-end machines will experience improved frame-rate consistency, resulting in fewer performance dips."

I've only played one game in the new patch so don't take this as a comprehensive analysis, but the FPS gain is definitely noticeable. I went from averaging 150-180 FPS to 190-220 FPS, and even though this increase will barely affect me its easy to see how much of an impact this change will have for those on lower-end machines. Now here's to hoping these changes will actually stick and that we won't have to receive another one of these performance updates in a couple of months!