Rainbow Six: Vegas: A Performance Analysis

Final Words

Rainbow Six: Vegas has all the elements of a great tactical shooter, with great graphics and very realistic AI. Your teammates are very handy and can take care of themselves, doing what you tell them while taking cover and engaging hostiles at their own discretion. As with any game AI they aren't perfect and sometimes they die for very stupid reasons, but mostly they are incredibly useful in clearing rooms and getting your missions accomplished. Similarly, the enemy AI is deadly at the "realistic" difficulty setting, and they will actively seek you out and try to flank your team while taking cover and using grenades or flashbangs. Clearing a room full of tangos requires the use of sound tactics, such as suppressing your enemy and sending a team or yourself to flank them while they hide behind cover. This element of realism that we've seen in games like Brothers in Arms is a nice touch and makes the game a lot more fun.

Gameplay aside, the game shows off the new Unreal Engine 3 nicely, and there are a lot of excellent graphical elements to the game. The smoke effect is good when you or an enemy pops a smoke grenade for cover, and the way explosions and gunfire interact with the environment causing damage to things like slot machines and glasses at adds a nice element of chaos to the action. As we've seen though, these graphical elements come at a high price, and Rainbow Six: Vegas is by no means a game for those with a low-end graphics solution.

Our performance tests show that in order to play this game smoothly with the resolution and quality settings at their highest, you will need at least an NVIDIA 8800 GTS (or possibly an overclocked X1950 XTX). The X1950 XTX and 7900 GTX at reference speeds can run the game at these settings without too much trouble, but they still see some choppiness when in a large firefight with a lot of stuff going on. Fortunately, the game still looks and plays well with the resolution and quality settings turned down, so don't despair if you aren't an owner of an 8800 yet and want to get a hold of this game. We still don't recommend playing Rainbow Six: Vegas on a low end card like the 7300 GT, because even at the lowest resolution and settings you will still probably run into choppy gameplay at certain points in the game, and the action can be fast-paced enough that this is a real problem. At this point in time, to really enjoy this game at a decent resolution you will probably want to go with at least a 7600 GT from NVIDIA or better yet an X1650 XT from ATI if you can get your hands on one. GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1900 GT are also good options.

Even though Rainbow Six: Vegas uses the Unreal Engine 3, something it shares with Epic's Gears of War for the Xbox360, its graphics don't really compare to Gears, and there are some places where the environments in Vegas could look better. One example is during the helicopter flight over Las Vegas at night. Overall though, Vegas' graphics are very impressive, and they certainly represent a significant improvement compared to other games like another Ubisoft title we may have mentioned a few times.

Hopefully we will see some improvements in performance for Vegas on NVIDIA's hardware soon, because as it stands, the game clearly favors ATI parts, with the obvious exception of the 8800. That is a trend we've seen more of over time, however: G70 series hardware does very well at DX8 graphics, but when more DX9 effects are enabled the pixel shaders on many NVIDIA chips don't seem to do as well as ATI's hardware. We might have liked to see the kind of control over graphics quality in Vegas that we've seen in games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, especially considering that maximum detail settings result in performance that is often lower than what we saw with Oblivion. Still, kudos to Ubisoft on this nice addition to the Rainbow Six series, and we look forward to further enjoying this game, as well as seeing what else comes along using the Unreal Engine 3 in the near future.