Dota 2 Cuts Support for Legacy Operating Systems

In a blog post, Valve stated that in a few months, Dota 2 will end support for 32-bit Windows and macOS versions older than 10.14. Dota 2 is finally DirectX 11 and Vulkan support DirectX 9 and OpenGL support will be discontinued. In Dota 2, there will also be a transition from SDL Audio to XAudio.

Blog, Dota 2’s better graphics, sound and performance points out how it is already taking advantage of newer operating systems and APIs for Until now, Valve has been supporting players using legacy systems.

‘We will provide a better Dota experience by removing old technologies’

The blog states that support will be cut to free up resources to focus on more up-to-date systems. “To remove these old technologies, to streamline our development efforts and will allow us to use the newer features of these APIs to provide an even better Dota experience“

Valve hasn’t released figures on what percentage of Dota 2 players this will affect, but says nothing will change for “most” players. Looking at the statistics of all Steam users (Dota 2 remains one of the most popular games on Steam), less than one percent 32-bit versions of Windows 7 or 10 and reveals that less than 0.2 percent are using macOS versions older than 10.14.

Games like LOL and Valorant offer more generous system requirements:

For comparison, Riot Games’ League of Legends includes 64-bit Windows in its recommended system requirements, but this is not the minimum criterion. LOL, Supports macOS up to version 10.12 but it does not support DirectX 9. Although Valorant has similarly generous system requirements, it only supports 64-bit Windows.

The same blog post also announced that Valve will start ticket sales for the 2021 Dota 2 International Championship on September 22. The championship will take place on 7 October in Bucharest, Romania. Valve, everyone involved be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and requires wearing a mask.