Valve just posted a big update surrounding ticket sales for The International 10, The International 2021 Compendium, and new features being added to the Dota 2 client’s Spectator HUD.
There was another a pretty big announcement: Valve decided to remove support for older systems and configurations.
As of now, the Dota developers are only planning the removal of support for older systems, so no concrete date has been set for when the “killer” update will go live. All Valve has said is that it will be implementing the following changes in the months to come.
- Remove support for Dota 2 across 32-bit systems, will fully push requirements to 64-bit machines and operation systems
- Remove support for macOS versions below 10.14
- Remove support for DirectX 9
- DirectX 9 users will be pushed to DirectX 11 programming
- Remove support for OpenGL
- Will switch OpenGl usage to Vulkan
- Remove support for XAudio (-xaudio) and switch to using SDL Audio (-sdlaudio)
These moves will allow Valve to support newer technology at the lowest level of development, which will improve development at all stages. And this will only affect a small number of players since most computers already support the new baseline requirements.
“Most players are already benefiting from the newer technologies, whether it’s via larger content sizes, higher frame rates, better graphical fidelity, or cleaner sounding audio,” Valve said. “Removing these older technologies will let us streamline our development efforts as well as use the newer features of these APIs to provide an even better Dota experience.”
Valve encourages players to test their current graphics API in the Dota 2 client and report if any issues pop up. More details about the new baseline requirements and other updates will be shared when the devs are ready to make the jump.
