Rainbow Six Siege Notebook Benchmarks

Rainbow Six Siege is the right title if you do not want to play rather simple action blockbuster titles like Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefront. While other games are basically dominated by firefights, the new game from Ubisoft is rather old-school – in the best way. Running through the levels with the gun and only trusting your aim will soon end your game. Instead, you have to rely on map experience, team communication and tactical decisions, similar to Counter-Strike or the old SWAT series. You can already feel a part of the thrilling atmosphere in the tutorial missions, which only show you the basics of the game.

It is therefore hardly an issue that Ubisoft did not create a graphics masterpiece. Despite or rather because of the second-class graphics of Rainbow Six Siege, the technology appears pretty sophisticated. Some players do complain about typical multiplayer bugs (connection issues etc.), but we did not encounter any serious problems in respect of crashes or graphics bugs. And as a PC gamer, you also get the feeling to be taken seriously. This impression is particularly created by the options menu, which convinces with a lot of explanations.

In this article, we only want to have a look at the video options, which are split up into two menus. Basic display settings can be found – as expected – in the Display tab. Besides the resolution, the picture mode, the frequency and the screen ratio, you can also adjust the viewing distance. Vertical sync is available as well. The majority of options is available in the Graphics menu: Almost 10 settings can be adjusted in multiple steps.

Great: Ubisoft included five presets for lazy or less experienced users that we – except for the preset Very High – also use for our benchmarks, even though the presets are not perfectly adjusted. For example, Rainbow Six does not use the maximum settings all the time in the Ultra preset (only SSBC instead HBAO+). A Medium shading quality in the preset Very High and just 4x AF in the setting High are not perfect, either. Furthermore, the title uses the post-processing anti-aliasing T-AA for every preset (FXAA optional), and we had to activate better versions manually. Siege also supports MSAA and TXAA, but they are much more demanding for the hardware.

Speaking of the performance: Anti-aliasing requires a lot of video memory, and you can get a good feel for the requirements thanks to the integrated VRAM indicator. While 1920 x 1080 pixels and the Ultra preset require around 2.5 GB, it is 3.5 GB for a combination of FHD and 8x MSAA (the same applies for 3840 x 2160 pixels without AA). It gets really extreme when you combine 4K and 8x MSAA: Not many laptop or desktop GPUs can handle 7.5 GB.