I recently purchased an Arc B580, and although I really like how it performs in almost all games I tried, I was quite disappointed by its performance on CS2. The card has a significant performance drop when using DX11 compared to other cards and when compared to using Vulkan as the game's API, which you can opt into by using the launch command "-vulkan". In my tests, using DX11 as the API for the game made the game run 20% slower than Vulkan, and almost 30% slower when Low Latency mode is enabled.
This is not the case with any other card from Nvidia and AMD; using Vulkan on those cards will actually make your performance slightly worse. My fear is that CS2 running on DX11 is such a nightmare for the Arc B580 that using Vulkan will make the card appear to run the game better, but in reality, it's just because the card delivers bad performance on DX11, which maybe is related to a possible CPU overhead issue in CS2 since I saw many people reporting that using Vulkan in other games that presented the overhead problem helped the performance.
My thoughts seem to make sense when compared to my friend's PC, which is identical to mine except for the GPU, as we bought the parts for our PCs together. My old GPU results also seem to indicate the same.
Compared to his 8GB RTX 3060, the B580 was around 22% slower in the scenario I tested, and it only could match the RTX 3060's performance using Vulkan. The problem is that CS2's implementation of Vulkan is not ideal; it's very unstable, with constant crashes and users mentioning latency issues with the game. I agree with those claims; even though Vulkan should be smoother, the game just feels laggy when using Vulkan compared to DX11, which feels better, especially when using the Low Latency mode. So using Vulkan in just not ideal for competitive players.
Apart from comparing the results with my friends 3060, I can also compare it with my old card, the GTX 1650. ( I did use DDU before installing the Arc B580 just to make that clear).
My 1650 gave me 322 average fps on the same settings my friend and I tested (all low, no FSR, 1280x960). The B580 almost looses compared to the 1650 when using Low Latency, which in the test I used to measure the performance with the 1650, Nvidia reflex was enabled. So these are awful results considering the GTX 1650 is a 6 year old low-end GPU, it should be notable better than the RTX 3060. Most of the tests I saw the support team doing were made with the game on ultra/high settings and also at 1080p, which are useless to me or to most competitive players as no one really plays with those settings.
I'd like to ask for this seemingly unexplained performance drop the Arc B580 has with DX11 on CS2 to be investigated further, if possible. I'll attach my full specs, data, explain how I gathered the data presented, and how to reproduce the results.
PC Specs:
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor.
- Maxsun Intel Arc B580 Milestone 12G (driver version 32.0.101.8136)
Motherboard: TUF GAMING B550M-plus.
Memory: Corsair Vengeance RGB RS 16GB DDR4 3200MHz (2x8).
Storage: Game and OS are installed on a NVMe M.2 drive.
OS: Windows 10.
Note: Rebar is turned on and PCIe is set to 4.0 in the BIOS settings.
Rebar is turned on and PCIe is set to 4.0 in the bios settings.
To make the benchmark averages I used the Steam Workshop map CS2 FPS BENCHMARK DUST2, using CapFrameX to record the average of 3 runs then making an average out of the results. On the end of each run, the map displays the average fps results on the developer console Window. I reached the conclusion that those results are accurate, because they are always really close to the averages CapFrameX registers. Knowing this, I asked my Friend to do 3 runs using specific video settings, then I did an average of the results, and compared said results with mine. His RTX 3060 made an average of 479.5 fps compared to the B580's 375.9 on DX11, making the Arc Card 21.61% slower compared to the 3060.
How to reproduce the results:
Settings used: Fullscreen, 1280x960, 4:3 aspect ratio (it may sound crazy, but most CS players play the game using this video resolution).
Low settings preset, set both FSR and boost player contrast to disabled.
Open the Dust 2 benchmark map using the workshop maps tab, and start capturing the performance as soon as the countdown is over and the game itself shows up. End the capture as soon as the game starts to fade out to display the results.
That should be all. Thank you for your time and attention. I hope I've been informative so far and I look forward to any potential updates in this matter. If any extra info is needed, please, let me know.
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