Optimize your graphic settings in R6 Siege

Are u curious if you're using the right graphical settings for your game? How can you improve your in-game experience by saving some FPS and even if your machine is a beast, eliminate the eye-candy to see your opponents faster.

The key to optimize your graphic settings in Rainbow Six Siege is to pay attention that you don't set everything to max even if you have a monster pc. Many of the graphic settings make it both harder to see enemies or can even cause you headaches, talking to you, bloom. If you've got a lower end system I've got you covered as well, as it's tempting to put everything on low so settings can gain you a lot more vision for a small punch on FPS.

My setup

To give you a starting point of what you can expect out of your system, I'll share you mine.

• GPU: Asus 980Ti Strix OC 6Gb
• CPU: i7 6700K @ 4.3
• CPU COOLER: H100i
• RAM: 16Gb of Corsair Vengeance

The reason why I've included the cooler of the CPU is that I've overclocked my CPU a little, in high-intensive games like Siege your CPU might be stretching to a 100% of usage. In that case you need to ensure you aint running in to heat issues.

The graphical settings

So to choose the best graphic settings for you I will list all of them and take screenshots of each one for comparisement.

Texture Quality

This will determine how good the texture will look, if you compare low vs very high you will see minor differences, but as my research determines the FPS hit is only 1 FPS there's no reason to not go for the very high setting.

How much FPS did I loose?

• Medium: 0
• High: 0
• Very high: 1

LOD Quality

For me the LOD is quite important, LOD stand for level of detail and it determines how detailed an object should be on longer distances. F.e. look at the tree below in the background.
I suggest keeping this on Ultra at all times.

How much FPS did I loose?

• Medium: 0
• High: 0
• Very high: 0
• Ultra: 0

Shading Quality

The shading quality will define how strong the shadows will be on the textures, again no performance hit.

How much FPS did I loose?

• Medium: 0
• High: 0

Shadow Quality

The shadows quality is not purely eye-candy, I use the shadows quite often in-game. Increasing the quality of the shadow makes it more appearent. The hit is average, so if you have some FPS to spare, use it on this one.

How much FPS did I loose?

• Medium: 2
• High: 4
• Very high: 4

Reflection Quality

I did not expect this performance hit by changing the reflection quality. You can kind of see it in the picture by looking at the wall on the left. The side panel reflects the brown-ish surroundings. Due to the lack of usefullness and the huge performance impact I usually tend to disable it.

How much FPS did I loose?

• Medium: 11
• High: 24

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion makes sure the ambient lighting is correct on the items. This is pure eye-candy so if you're in for performance disable this feature. I welcome the extra quality on this one, so I tend to go with HBAO+ since it looks a lot better than SSBC with only a 3FPS increase.
Do not enable this one if you're short on resources

How much FPS did I loose?

• SSBC: 17
• HBAO+: 20

Lens Effects

For me this is pretty obvious, it impacts performance (only slight) while being in my way of seeing the enemy. I disable this one, since I prefer seeing my enemies.

How much FPS did I loose?

• Bloom: 2
• Bloom + Lens: 3

Anti-Aliasing

Ever noticed a line is never completely straight if you're gaming? Anti-aliasing tries to tackle this problem by softing the edges. Since putting it off makes no sense I usually enable T-AA. Looks better than FXAA and has the least performance impact of them all. T-AA-2X and 4X are just way to much loss.

You can see the difference between all AA's if you look closely to the read pole and the ones next to it.

How much FPS did I loose? ( Default was T-AA, as it was the highest )

• Off: 40
• FXAA: 43
• T-AA-2x: 57
• T-AA-4x: 95

T-AA Sharpness

I must say, I find this one weird. I don't see much difference between 0 and 50%, but 100% is somehow a lot sharper, again look at the details on the left next to the red pole.
So if you decide your 5FPS impact is worth it, go for the 100% sharpness factor.

How much FPS did I loose? ( Default was T-AA, as it was the highest )

• 50%: 5
• 100%: 5

Conclusion

I tested all of the settings with AA on T-AA-2x to give me an overall lower FPS to start with, I did this because I wanted to measure the performance hit per setting so it doesn't really matter as long as I use the same accross one setting.

To test the AA setting I had everything on the highest setting.

Setting	Value	FPS
Texture Quality	Low	124
	Medium	124
	High	124
	Very High	123
LOD Quality	Low	124
	Medium	124
	High	124
	Very High	124
	Ultra	124
Shading Quality	Low	124
	Medium	124
	High	124
Shadow Quality	Low	124
	Medium	122
	High	120
Reflection Quality	Low	124
	Medium	113
	High	100
Ambient Occlusion	Off	124
	SSBC	107
	HBAO+	104
Lens Effects	Off	124
	Bloom	122
	Bloom + Lens flare	121
Anti-Aliasing	Off	100
	T-AA	140
	FXAA	97
	T-AA-2x	83
	T-AA-4x	45
T-AA Sharpness	0%	124
	50%	119
	100%	119

 

Thanks for reading my article, hopefully it was helpfull and if you need have questions feel free to ask by commenting below!