What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here!
As promised in my last video where I discussed the benefits and drawbacks of using non-native
aspect ratios (such as 4:3), I have gone out and tested every graphics setting in Rainbow
Six Siege to find out which would be the best for optimal game performance and competitive advantage.
So in this video, I will take you through the graphics settings one by one, demonstrate
and explain exactly what they do for you in game and give my recommendation in terms of
what settings will give you the best results in terms of framerate and image quality.
To start off, let me say first of all that of course every PC is different and the settings for consoles vary again.
Now my PC is quite powerful, check the description for full specs, but I will explain each setting
so that you can choose the best for you, no matter how powerful you gaming machine is.
Some of these settings will be quite simple and straightforward while for others;
I will go a bit more in depth.
As a general rule, you will want to pick the settings that give you the best framerate
that your monitor can handle but at least over 60 FPS at all times.
For instance, if you have a 120hz monitor, that would be your target but going above that won’t be very helpful.
So with those general thoughts out of the way, let’s just start at the top and work our way down!
When it comes to texture quality there are differences in terms of the quality of the
image you will end up with and there are also performance differences but neither of these
factors are hugely impacted.
When you compare the two most extreme texture quality settings, low and ultra, you can see
that for many of the map textures, such as walls and floors, the differences are definitely
noticeable but only when you get really close and when you put the two versions side by side.
I could also spot differences when I checked really unimportant textures such as the ones
on books and drinks bottles and yes sure, when you have the textures set to low, these
objects are pretty damn ugly but will running at these settings impact your ability to spot enemies?
Let’s take a look at the way operators will look at low, high and ultra settings.
Again, when compared side by side, you can definitely see a difference but in game, this
will only be an issue when you get relatively close to your opponents.
Running at higher texture qualities will have a significant impact on the amount of graphics
card RAM that will be required but as long as your graphics card can handle that, the
impact on your framerate will actually be quite small.
My conclusion for texture quality is that going for the low setting will definitely
impact the visual quality of your game but the impact on spotting and tracking targets is probably minimal.
At the same time though, the game will look an awful lot prettier if you go for a higher
setting and the lost frames can be made up using other settings.
So for me personally, I will stick with high or I might even give very high a go but if
you’re on an older machine, you may want to consider medium or high at most.
With the next setting, texture filtering, my experience was a little different.
When set to the lowest setting (linear) you can definitely see a distinct blurring effect
when you look along straight surfaces at a sharp angle.
You can see this effect when standing close to walls and looking along them and even crawling
along the floor was enough to create this blurry effect.
I have to say that I personally find the effect both unattractive and kind of distracting.
Could you get used to it and learn to ignore it?
Sure.
Will it have a negative effect on being able to spot enemies?
Probably not, but on my rig, turning the settings up to the maximum of 16x anisotropic filtering
also had very little performance impact.
I maybe saw a decrease of 1 or 2 frames per second when switching between these two extremes
and even if you are on a laptop or older PC and need to save frames, I would say that
this is not the setting to do it on.
If you feel your machine struggling on 16x, try 8 or 4x but I feel that most people will
not have too many issues here.
Next up, we have the level of detail or LOD quality, which is basically a setting that
changes at which distance objects within the game switch from a high detail to a low detail polygonal frame.
Let me demonstrate this on our hostage here.
With LOD quality set to low, you can see that between 4 and 6 meters distance the character
model’s shoulders start to shrink a little and the t-shirt starts clipping through the jacket.
This is because the underlying frame is simplified to save on graphical processing load.
In comparison, if we set this to ultra, this change will happen between 19 and 21m at which
point it will be far less noticeable.
Is this an important setting for spotting opponents in the game?
I think to a degree it is…
If Vigil is hiding in a dark corner or if an opponent is holding a long angle with only
a small sliver of their body showing from behind cover, then the slightly less natural
looking shape of the lower detail mesh might just be that little bit harder to spot.
Of course the average kill distance in Rainbow Six is below 10m so it could be argued that
setting the LOD quality all the way to ultra is excessive and unnecessary but again, this
is one of those settings that didn’t have a massive FPS impact for me, so I personally
will be sticking with Ultra but you may wish to go with somewhere around the middle depending on your setup.
When it comes to the shading quality, the game tells us that this will adjust the rendering’s
visual fidelity by tweaking lighting quality, skin subsurface scattering, etc…
I tested all three available settings and for the life of me I couldn’t really see
any visual difference in the image quality on screen and the performance impact for my
machine was basically non-existent as well.
You might as well switch this to low, I think.
Shadow quality on the other hand is somewhat different.
This setting controls the resolution of the dynamic shadows used in game.
The higher the setting, the more detailed the shadows of objects and characters in the
game will be and this will come at a bit of a performance impact.
For the greatest performance increase, you can set the shadow quality to low, which will
turn dynamic shadows off completely.
On my machine, this gave me an increase of around 10-15 FPS compared to the very high
setting but this choice may also impact your gameplay.
On the one hand, turning off the shadows cast by objects on the map such as tables, couches
etc. could make it easier to spot a sneaky opponent trying to hide in certain spots.
So there is actually a potential benefit to removing dynamic shadows completely.
On the other hand, setting the quality to low will also remove the shadows cast by the
other players in the game and I have definitely been in situation where a shadow coming through
a doorway a few hundred milliseconds before the opponent has given me an easy kill or
made me an easy target.
On balance, I would say that having shadows is more beneficial than not having them, so
I would recommend you go for at least the medium setting which for me still gave me
a saving of around 5 FPS versus very high.
If you want slightly prettier shadows and have the machine to handle the processing
load, you could also go for high but very high seemed unnecessary for me
since the quality increase was negligible.
So shadow quality is definitely one of the more important settings for you to consider
but if we move on to reflection quality, we have a similar situation to shading quality.
I spent hours walking around in custom games examining different reflective surfaces on
different maps and then comparing the footage at different settings and I was unable to
find any significant different in the way any of them looked.
Even when set to high, destroying the objects that were being reflected still did not change
the reflections themselves, so whatever setting you go for, reflections always seem static.
Bottom line is, you may as well go for low even if the performance improvement is relatively small.
With the ambient occlusion setting, we return to shadows.
Here, the choice is pretty straightforward.
Deeper, richer shadows can create better hiding spots for your opponents on the map, so by
using either the SSBC or HBAO+ setting, you could be making things more difficult for
yourself in addition to using up more processing power and lowering your FPS.
I keep this off and you should too.
The same really goes for lens effects.
Bloom and lens flare artefacts give the illusion that you are watching something that has been
filmed on a camera rather than through the eyes of the operator you are controlling.
This makes no sense at all, except maybe for games where you play as a robot who actually
has cameras for eyes or if you are playing a third person game where a camera is floating
above and behind your character… so fine, yes there are situations in which this could
make sense but for the most part this is kind of silly for first person games.
For Rainbow Six (and other competitive games for that matter) my recommendation is really
simple again: Turn these effects all the way off.
You wasting your FPS with these effects and in the worst case, you might actually be putting
yourself at a disadvantage by including these distracting effects that make target recognition
and tracking harder than it needs to be.
And again, the same goes for zoom-in depth of field.
Why use processing power on a blur effect that could actually put you at a disadvantage
when aiming downs sights?
And now, last but not least, we come to the anti-aliasing settings.
The options here were changed recently and we have three different settings remaining:
the choice of anti-aliasing and then render scaling and sharpness.
This looks a bit complex at first but let me break it down for you.
When it comes to the anti-aliasing choice, there are basically only three different settings:
T-AA, off and FXAA.
At the high end, you can (in theory) also choose T-AA x2 or x4 but all this does is
use T-AA and then render the game at double or quadruple your native resolution.
Actually using either of these two options has an insane impact on your game performance,
so unless you like playing at 23 FPS, these settings are probably not for you.
The render scaling can help you to significantly lower the impact of the anti-aliasing by lowering
the resolution at which the game is rendering and in theory, using double T-AA at 50% scaling
or quad T-AA at 25% should result in the same quality and performance as single T-AA at
100% but when I tested it, that wasn’t quite the case.
Going for 2 or 4 times T-AA and then scaling down produced an image quality that actually
looked a little blurrier than single T-AA and also resulted in lower FPS, so my clear
recommendation based on my test is to stay away from the double or quad settings.
So as mentioned that leaves 3 settings, T-AA, off or FXAA.
I have seen some people say that turning anti-aliasing off is actually thy best choice for Rainbow
Six Siege since it will make it easier to spot pixel peeking opponents.
I can’t say for sure if that is the case but what you can see very clearly from my
tests is that without anti-aliasing, straight lines will take on this saw tooth pattern
which I find not only significantly unattractive but I think this could also make it harder
to spot opponents on narrow angles.
So that’s out too and only leaves T-AA and FXAA and in my comparisons, FXAA looked blurrier
with no significant performance increase and that means that my choice here would clearly be T-AA.
If you are looking for an FPS boost, you can get that here by adjusting the render scaling down a little.
Even 10 or 20% can give you a decent FPS boost without making the image on screen look very different.
The sharpness setting can also help save a few frames but I would advise against taking
this down if you can avoid it.
The image will quickly become blurry and you will be better off taking the scaling down another notch or two.
And that’s it.
Every graphical settings option in Rainbow Six Siege tested, explained and demonstrated!
I hope that you found at least some of this info useful and somewhat interesting.
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Anyway, as always: thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video
and I will see you in the next episode!