
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, published by Ubisoft in 2015, has remained a classic in the tactical team-based PVP gameplay genre since its launch. One of Ubisoft’s best-selling titles with a strong consistent player count over the years, staying in the top 50 charts and strongly positive reviews, this title is a testament to how to run a live-service game properly. Entering its ninth year, with the Y9S4 (year 9 season 4) update being poised to come out this December, let’s look at how to maximize your frames and squeeze the best performance out of your rig for this game while maintaining visual fidelity.
Here’s our Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege PC (2024) optimization guide with benchmarks for every graphics setting.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
- Enable Resizable BAR.
- Turn on Game Mode.
- Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
- Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
- Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
- Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
- Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege: PC System Requirements
Minimum Specs (1080p/60FPS)
- Operating system Windows 10, Windows 11 (64-bit versions)
- Processor AMD Ryzen 3 1200 @ 3.1 GHz, Intel Core i5-4590 @ 3.3 GHz, or better
- RAM 8 GB
- Video card AMD RX 460 (2 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2 GB), or better
- Hard drive 85.5 GB available storage (SSD)
- DirectX version DirectX 12
Recommended Specs (1080p/60FPS)
- Operating system Windows 10, Windows 11 (64-bit versions)
- Processor AMD Ryzen 3 1200 @ 3.1 GHz, Intel Core i5-4590 @ 3.3 GHz, or better
- RAM 8 GB
- Video card AMD RX 560 (4 GB), Intel ARC A380 (6 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (4 GB), or better
- Hard drive 85.5 GB available storage (SSD)
- DirectX version DirectX 12
Recommended 2K Specs (1440p/60FPS)
- Operating system Windows 10, Windows 11 (64-bit versions)
- Processor AMD Ryzen 5 1600 @ 3.2 GHz, Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4 GHz, or better
- RAM 8 GB
- Video card AMD RX 570 (4 GB), Intel ARC A380 (6 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB), or better
- Hard drive 85.5 GB available storage
- DirectX DirectX 12
Recommended 4K Specs (4K/60FPS)
- Operating system Windows 10, Windows 11 (64-bit versions)
- Processor AMD Ryzen 5 3600 @ 3.6 GHz, Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.7 GHz, or better
- RAM 8 GB
- Video card AMD RX 5600 XT (6 GB), Intel ARC A750 (8 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (8 GB), or better
- Hard drive 85.5 GB available storage
- DirectX DirectX 12
Contents & Testing Methodology
- Contents:
- Graphics Presets and Resolution Scaling.
- Texture Anisotropic Filtering & Resolution.
- Shadow Quality and Level of Detail Quality.
- Ambient Occlusion & Reflections.
- VFX & Shader Quality.
- Lens Effects, Zoom, Anti Aliasing
- Upscaling options
- VRAM usage.
- CPU bottlenecks.
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege: Performance Summary.
- Best settings for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege PC 2024.
- Hardware setup used:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-14700KF.
- Cooler: Asus ROG Strix LC II 360.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z790 Gaming X AX.
- Memory: 16GB x2 DDR5-6000 CL36.
- Power Supply: Corsair RM1000e.
Graphics Presets & Resolution Scaling
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege experiences CPU bottlenecking with resolution scaling, averaging 211 FPS at 4K, 361 FPS at 1440p, and 399 FPS at 1080p “Ultra” Preset. These numbers indicate a CPU-bound workload at 1080p, with a GPU-busy deviation of 14% noticed in our tests.

Changing the graphics presets yields less uniform performance scaling. The lowest three presets showcase massive jumps in framerates, with 4K “Low” showing a whole 17% increase from 4K “Medium“, compared to a tiny 5% gain from 4K “Ultra” to 4K “Very High“. The low preset turns off many settings and helps bring about this massive change, as we shall see individually below.






Texture Anisotropic Filtering & Resolution
Anisotropic filtering usually helps make distant objects look sharper, especially ones at an oblique angle to the camera. Without it, you’ll notice blurriness in textures farther seen farther away. This doesn’t notably impact performance and is best left at the highest (AF 16X) for the sharpest textures.






Texture quality determines how detailed an object looks on the surface by changing the resolution of the loaded textures. This determines how much VRAM (GPU’s memory) is needed. This has negligible impact on FPS as it’s purely a VRAM-dependent issue. Note that in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, you need to download a separate 30 GB DLC for Ultra textures to be enabled.
Keep this at the highest possible value for your GPU’s VRAM budget.

At 4K, we noticed 8 GB at “Ultra,” 7 GB at “Very High“, 6 GB at “High“, and between 5-6 GB for “Medium” and “Low“. Keep in mind this includes Windows and other background processes too, but it is safer to account for these to avoid stutters from operational conflicts.







Shadow Quality & Level of Detail Quality
LOD adjusts the polygon count of different meshes. Higher settings produce more detailed (3D-wise) objects, while lower values yield more flat-looking surfaces. What this means is that elements like grass will have higher density, will load in farther from the camera and there’ll be generally more polygons in the environmental objects as we go higher in quality.
Curiously as seen below, decreasing the LOD also decreased our average framerates steadily. We have a few theories as to why this might be, but for now, it also means changing the LOD has minimal difference in performance and is best kept at “Ultra“.






Shadow Quality adjusts the resolution of shadow maps, impacting framerates and VRAM consumption. Going from Ultra to High gives us a 2.8% increase, High to Medium has no difference, and going down to low gives a 6% increase.





Ambient Occlusion & Reflections
Ambient occlusion is the soft shadows and indirect lighting from the environment, intersecting to create depth. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege uses a technique developed by Ubisoft called “SSBC” (Screen Space Bent Cone), which is an advanced form of Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) leveraging bent normals and cone sampling.
Turning off ambient occlusion gives a healthy 12% boost to FPS, and as such is recommended to be kept off for competitive gaming. SSBC+, a more demanding version of SSBC, drops the frames further and is not recommended.




Reflection Quality setting refers to screen-space reflections here. And does not affect player reflections. There is a massive boost to FPS here, with Low giving a massive 17% boost from High. Recommended to keep at “Low” for competitive and “Medium” for a balance. Low offers static cube map reflections while Medium and High contain screen space reflections at varying resolutions (half and full respectively).




VFX & Shader Quality
VFX quality controls the density of onscreen particle effects and their influence on lighting, along with decals, debris, and dust. Unless you’ve opted for the highest quality setting, the resulting framerates should be within the reasonable range. There are barely any differences and it is recommended to just keep it at “High“.






Shader Quality controls the impact of lighting on a scene. This includes the tone of different surfaces, reflection quality, shadow range and softness, and luminance. There is barely a difference noticed here as well, and you’re better off keeping this at “High“.




Lens Effects, Zoom, Anti Aliasing
Lens effects simulate real-world optical lenses. Off has none, bloom consists of a glow around lights and other bright areas, while lens flare simulates camera lens artifacts. We noticed a 4.5% increase in FPS on turning everything off, and competitively you’re better off without these effects too. Keep them “Off“.




Meanwhile, the zoom-in Depth of Field effect also enhances FPS significantly, and blurring parts of the screen while offering realism, can be a disadvantage for your competitive shooter abilities. We recommend keeping this “Off” as well.



Finally, we have anti-aliasing, which helps prevent jaggies and create a smoother image by blending the edges of pixels. TAA (Temporal Anti Aliasing) has the best balance. FXAA (Fast Approximate AA) is faster and gives a higher FPS. Stay away from the “2x/4x” ones as these basically render the image at a higher res and then apply TAA, before downscaling it. A massive waste of resources for a competitive shooter. Do not turn this off unless you are using DLSS or FSR, as jagged edges are not helpful.






Upscaling Options
Like most competitive shooters, upscaling is among the most important settings in Tomy Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. By default, the game presets set you up at a 50 render resolution. We recommend just going with the DLSS or FSR 2 options as these are far superior to the normal render scaling option.
As seen below, DLSS Auto performs admirably with minimal loss in visual fidelity providing a whopping 57% increase in FPS. Keep this at Quality if you want the least reduction in visual fidelity. Stay away from Ultra Performance and even Performance if you can, as these tend to make the end result look very blurry and disadvantageous to your competitive gameplay.







Quality Mode | Scale factor | Input resolution | Output resolution |
---|---|---|---|
DLAA/Native AA | 1.0x per dimension (1.0x area scale) (100% screen resolution) | 1920 x 1080 2560 x 1440 3440 x 1440 3840 x 2160 | 1920 x 1080 2560 x 1440 3440 x 1440 3840 x 2160 |
Quality | 1.5x per dimension (2.25x area scale) (67% screen resolution) | 1280 x 720 1706 x 960 2293 x 960 2560 x 1440 | 1920 x 1080 2560 x 1440 3440 x 1440 3840 x 2160 |
Balanced | 1.7x per dimension (2.89x area scale) (59% screen resolution) | 1129 x 635 1506 x 847 2024 x 847 2259 x 1270 | 1920 x 1080 2560 x 1440 3440 x 1440 3840 x 2160 |
Performance | 2.0x per dimension (4x area scale) (50% screen resolution) | 960 x 540 1280 x 720 1720 x 720 1920 x 1080 | 1920 x 1080 2560 x 1440 3440 x 1440 3840 x 2160 |
Ultra Performance | 3.0x per dimension (9x area scale) (33% screen resolution) | 640 x 360 854 x 480 1147 x 480 1280 x 720 | 1920 x 1080 2560 x 1440 3440 x 1440 3840 x 2160 |
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege: VRAM Usage
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege uses up to 8 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Ultra.” Stepping down to “Very High” reduces the VRAM usage to 7 GB, while “High” uses over 5 GB. The lowest presets use up to 5-6 GB at 4K.

1080p and 1440p use 6-7 GB of graphics memory at the “Ultra” quality graphics preset regardless of the upscaling method.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege: CPU Bottlenecks
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is well-optimized for multi-core CPUs. The game is primarily CPU-bound at 1080p with an average GPU-Busy deviation of 14% at the highest quality preset.

QHD and 4K UHD produce almost no GPU-Busy Deviation indicating a primarily GPU-bound case at higher resolutions.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Performance Summary
- Reflection Quality is the most taxing graphics setting in Call of Duty: Warzone, granting a 17%+ performance boost when set to low.
- Ambient Occlusion is second, improving framerates by 12% when turned off.
- Texture Quality confers a 9% FPS boost when disabled.
- Anti- Aliasing can enhance framerates by up to 8%.

Best Settings for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege 2024 PC
Optimized Settings | High-end (Visual Fidelity) | High-end (Competitive) | Midrange (Competitive) | Low-end PC (Competitive) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Resolution | 4K (3840×2160) | 1440p (2560×1440) | 1440p (2560×1440) | 1080p (1920×1080) |
Target FPS | 180 FPS | 240 FPS | 180 FPS | 144 FPS |
Texture Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra | Very High |
Texture Filtering | AF 16x | AF 16x | AF 16x | AF 16x |
LOD Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra | High |
Shading Quality | High | High | High | High |
Shadow Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Very High | Low |
Reflection Quality | High | Low | Low | Low |
VFX Quality | Ultra | Very High | High | Medium |
Ambient Occlusion | SSBC+ | Off | Off | Off |
Lens Effects | Bloom+Lens Flare | Off | Off | Off |
Zoom-In DOF | On | Off | On | Off |
Upscaling | None | DLSS or FSR 3 Balanced | DLSS or FSR Balanced | DLSS or FSR Balanced |
Anti-Aliasing | TAA | FXAA/Off+DLSS | FXAA/Off+DLSS | FXAA/Off+DLSS |
CPU | Core i7-14700K/Ryzen 7 7800X3D | Core i5-13600K/Ryzen 5 7600X | Core i5-12400/ AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
GPU | RTX 4080/RX 7900 XTX | RTX 4070/RX 7800 XT | RTX 3060/RTX 3060 Ti/RX 6600 |
Memory | 32GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | Less than: 16GB (dual-channel) |
High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC |