There’s a lot more to the new patch which you can read the notes on here, or alternatively read the full breakdown of Vulkan’s introduction here.Low Vs Ultra Radeon RX 590 8GB Performance Review
So that’s all there is to the new update that introduces Vulkan to Siege. Console players will have already seen the benefit of this since launch of Rainbow Six on consoles, however for PC players DirectX11 did not allow them to utilise this option, but Vulkan does. Siege players will be able to choose a target frame rate they want to achieve and the game will automatically adjust the render resolution accordingly.įor players who are GPU-bound, this should provide more consistent framerates in-game.Īsync compute will allow Rainbow Six Siege to execute tasks in parallel on the GPU, providing more tools and opportunities for better and improved optimisation. Render target aliasing will dynamically adjust the render scaling ratio depending on your GPU’s workload.
Resulting in less pressure on the driver and freeing up more CPU cycles.įor players who are CPU-bound, this should provide more consistent framerates in-game. So now onto the fun stuff, what exactly will we see improve in-game? According to Ubisoft, Vulkan will allow Siege to take advantage of three main features which will improve workload performance:ĭynamic texture indexing will help to reduce CPU usage in Rainbow 6 Siege by issuing fewer draw calls to the GPU (basically asking for less information than it needs to from the GPU). When it comes to API’s there are a lot of different features each one will allow you to access from the GPU, and after an extensive amount of internal testing they decided to choose Vulkan because it showed better performance on the CPU. When looking at upgrading, there was a choice between DirectX12 and Vulkan.
Considering that your maximum frame-rate is determined by the slower of the two, ie the bottleneck, upgrading to a new API is a big decision.Ĭurrently, R6 Siege uses DirectX11, which is good - albeit a little dated - but the team wanted to upgrade their API in order to improve graphics performance within the game (as we all know how precious those frames can be in an uber-competitive game of Siege) and reduce the workload on both CPUs and GPUs. So that’s a lot of steps to get through before any actual information reaches your graphics card, and an API can make a lot of difference when it comes to the workload on your CPU or GPU. Within your CPU: when you move the mouse or keyboard that information is sent to the game, which is then processed by the API and sent as a command to the GPU, which then turns that command into what you see on screen, pixel by pixel. The graphic above explains the basic process of how your input turns into what you see on the screen. Essentially they are a bridge between the game itself and your graphics card, acting as communication between the two. What does this mean for players? Well, hopefully it'll mean better performance and higher frame rates across the board in Rainbow 6: Siege.Ī number of improvements have been claimed, but bearing in mind they are still testing the new system some players may experience decreased performance for a while after the latest patch.īefore we get to the nitty-gritty stuff, let's take a moment to discuss what an API is in order to better understand how this will improve the overall experience of R6 Siege.īoth Vulkan and DirectX 11 are Graphics Application Programming Interfaces, more commonly known as Graphics API’s. Rainbow Six: Siege has been updated today - along with some balancing and bug fixes we will see the implementation of the Vulkan graphics API.