Rainbow Six Siege's graphical settings influence the game’s appearance and, by extension, affect how the game performs on your system. R6S also includes a Render Scaling setting (in certain enabled settings) that adjusts the game’s rendering resolution, meaning that you can render the game at a higher or lower resolution than your native resolution.
In this section, we’ll examine how each graphical setting affects the Rainbow Six Siege’s visuals and performance.
Graphics Quality Presets
Along with a number of general modes, Rainbow Six Siege also comes with an auto-detect feature which so far seems to be pretty accurate to what people's PCs can handle. It is worth noting here that R6S for PC leans toward prioritizing frame rate output rather than visual quality.
The quality presets are ideal for those who don't want to touch individual settings, allowing you to change multiple settings at once.
In general, we’ve found that you’re better off adjusting the individual settings to cater your performance and visuals to your particular needs and tastes.
Performance Impact: Up to 70% between Low and Ultra (the Ultra preset includes a 50 render scaling)
Drag the bar to compare Quality Presets on Low and on Ultra.
Texture Quality
By itself, this is one of the more obvious changes you can make to the game to make it run on lower end hardware.
On the Low setting at 1080p, Ubisoft advises that you only need 1GB of GPU memory, whereas the Very High textures require 4GB (with the optional Ultra DLC needing 6GB). Honestly, this is one of the settings you can afford to lose.
Performance Impact: Up to 10% between Low and Very High, depending on map location
Drag the bar to compare Texture Quality on Low and on Very High.
Anisotropic Filtering
This is designed to enhance the quality of surface textures, making them look sharper and more defined. By itself, it doesn't have a great impact on frame rate.
Performance Impact: ~3% between Linear and Anisotropic 16X
Drag the bar to compare Anisotropic Filtering on Linear and on Anisotropic 16X.
Level of Detail (LOD)
This has a direct impact on the visible details of distant objects, so it's more obvious outside—but it can impact details indoors in very large rooms.
Performance Impact: ~4% between Low and Ultra
Drag the bar to compare Level of Detail on Low and on Ultra.
Shading
Shading is a very subtle effect in the game as it cleans up textures to make them react more accurately to light, as well as other textures.
Performance Impact: Up to 20% between Low and High, depending on map location
Drag the bar to compare Shading on Low and on High.
Shadows
This setting very simply impacts the realism of shadows, as well as the amount of objects casting shadows in the first place.
Performance Impact: ~4% between Low and Very High
Drag the bar to compare Shadows on Low and on Very High.
Reflections
Another subtle effect to see at first glance is reflections, which impacts... well, reflections. This is most obvious when looking at glass and water reflections and—depending on how much work is being done by the GPU—it can have a large impact.
Performance Impact: ~15% between Low and High
Drag the bar to compare Reflections on Low and on High.
Look at how the water changes by the tires and barrels, as well as the reflection of the building itself on the top right of the shot above the gun.
Ambient Occlusion
This impacts how three-dimensional everything looks on-screen, generally making things that are meant to have depth and shape look a little more realistic, rather than being flat textures.
Performance Impact: ~8-10% between Off and HBAO+
Drag the bar to compare Ambient Occlusion turned Off and on HBAO+.
Pay attention to the wall texture and how the lamp post interacts with it, changing the lighting between HBAO+ and OFF. Also look for smaller changes by the tree and fencing.
Lens Effects
Unfortunately, as this is mostly visible when things are in motion, this was essentially impossible to replicate accurately for a set of comparison screenshots—but this setting impacts gun effects, explosions, and building destruction.
Performance Impact: ~1-8% between Off and On, depending on how many effects are being processed
Zoom-in Depth of Field
This has little to no impact as it purely impacts the weapon detailing when scoped. Change this according to your own preference.
Drag the bar to compare Zoom-in Depth of Field turned Off and On.
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing is one of the more complex options in R6S's settings because it unlocks additional settings in the game. But in general, anti-aliasing by itself is there to give smoother edges to objects in the game.
There's a number of massively GPU-intensive modes here. The game will warn you not to enable T-AA 4x unless you're running a very high-end GPU; we would advise only running it if you have a GTX 1080 Ti and you are running Rainbow Six Siege at or below 1080p resolution.
Performance Impact: ~50% between Off and T-AA enabled, and ~60% between T-AA enabled and T-AA 4X
Drag the bar to compare Anti-aliasing turned Off and on T-AA 4X.
As with most AA settings, pay attention to the jagged lines when AA is off.
Render Scaling
One of two settings which you are only able to adjust if T-AA is enabled, render scaling impacts the overall resolution Rainbow Six Siege is rendered at.
This can be a subtle change depending on the resolution you are playing at; at 1080p, scaling the game down can provide a huge improvement to frame rate for a minimal drop to quality. This is mainly because T-AA does a lot of very smart blurring of finer details to counteract the drop in render scaling.
Performance Impact: ~30% between 50% and 100%
Drag the bar to compare Render Scaling on 50% and on 100%.
Pay attention to the smaller details like the shadows and textures; the difference is very slight here.
T-AA Sharpness
This one governs your preference for T-AA, and as such you must have T-AA enabled to take advantage of it.
Essentially, it determines the level of sharpness applied by T-AA to textures. Some like the super-sharp textures, whereas some think it makes it too artificial. You could probably set this to 50% for a happy middleground!
Performance Impact: ~3% between 0% and 100%
Drag the bar to compare T-AA Sharpness on 0% and on 100%.
