Vulkan in Rainbow Six Siege Tested – A major boost for modern graphics cards

Conclusion – Is Vulkan the new API of choice for Rainbow Six: Siege? 

After testing eight graphics cards across five graphics architectures, we know that Rainbow Six: Siege doesn’t see universal benefits from using the Vulkan API. That said, a majority of our tested graphics cards achieved higher framerates under the API, making its use a must for users of modern graphics architectures.

On AMD/Radeon graphics hardware, Rainbow Six: Siege players should see significant boosts to game performance. We found that using the Vulkan API had a larger impact on average framerates than 99th percentile framerates, but that performance benefits were achievable on all tested AMD graphics architectures. Polaris, Vega and RDNA hardware all benefitted from the change, and these performance boosts should also apply to older GCN graphics cards from AMD, assuming they have enough VRAM. 

For Nvidia users, things are a lot more complex. Pascal series graphics cards saw marginal performance changes, with small boosts to average framerates in most cases and marginally lower 99th percentile framerates. The main conclusion here is that Siege’s Vulkan performance is nigh identical to the game’s DirectX 11 performance on Pascal series Nvidia graphics cards. This means that the only real benefit of Vulkan for Pascal users is the game’s newly added support for Variable Resolution Scaling. 

Nvidia’s Turing series graphics cards see much larger benefits from using the Vulkan API in Rainbow Six: Siege, seeing notable performance boosts across all resolutions. Both 99th percentile and average framerates see significantly increased, making the API a no-brainer for users of Nvidia’s latest hardware.  

When looking at our data, one point is clear. Using the Vulkan API has no negative impact on Rainbow Six any of the graphics cards that we tested. Yes, the game’s performance on Nvidia’s Pascal hardware is marginally different, but performance differences of 2 or fewer FPS are small enough to be dismissed. Looking at things practically, Pascal users receive nigh identical game performance when using Vulkan, but gain support for a great feature with Dynamic Resolution Scaling. 

If you are using a modern Nvidia graphics card or any Vulkan-compatible AMD graphics card, you should see a performance boost when playing Rainbow Six: Sieve with the Vulkan API.  
 
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