Rainbow Six Siege 1440p FPS: How Much Performance Can Your GPU Deliver?

Rainbow Six Siege is one of the few competitive shooters where 1440p is an easy ask rather than a compromise. It runs on AnvilNext 2.0, it has been optimised across a decade of seasons, and its published minimum asks for 4 GB of VRAM — so the question is almost never “can my card run it”. It is “which refresh rate can my card actually feed”.

What actually decides your 1440p frame rate in Siege

Three things, in this order. Your graphics card's throughput sets the ceiling — moving from 1080p to 1440p costs roughly a fifth of your frame rate in this engine, which is a gentler penalty than a modern single-player title imposes. Your processor matters more here than almost anywhere else: Siege sits in the esports performance class, where the CPU carries a large share of the result, so a fast graphics card behind an old processor will not reach the numbers in the table below. Your preset is the biggest lever you personally control — Low is worth about half again the frame rate of High.

Every estimate below pairs the graphics card with AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, this site's 1.00 processor reference. On a slower processor you will see noticeably less, and Siege punishes that harder than most games.

Above that reference the model stops crediting the CPU at 1440p — it treats the graphics card as the limit, so a faster processor returns the same estimate rather than a higher one. In a real Siege match at 1440p a much faster chip usually is worth some frames, so read these as the graphics card's contribution with the processor taken out of the way, not as a ceiling a better CPU cannot beat.

Estimated Rainbow Six Siege FPS at 1440p, by graphics card

Average FPS at 2560×1440, estimated. Sorted by the High preset. † marks results at the model's 360 FPS reporting ceiling — above that it stops separating cards, so read those as "as fast as this model will report", not as a figure for that specific card. Siege's performance profile is calibrated against PC Optimized Settings, ProSettings (2024).

What the numbers mean for your monitor

A frame rate only matters relative to what your display can show. Against the three refresh rates competitive players actually buy, at 1440p on the High preset:

• 240 Hz — RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RX 9070 XT and RTX 5070 are estimated to keep up.
• 165 Hz — RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RX 9070 XT, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 SUPER, RX 7800 XT and 1 more clear it.
• 144 Hz — 8 of the 12 cards listed clear it, including the Arc B580 at the bottom of that group.

The pattern worth noticing: in Siege the gap between a mid-range card and a flagship is a gap between high frame rates, not between playable and unplayable. If your monitor is 144 Hz, a card several tiers down the table buys you nothing you can see.

How much do settings really change it?

More than most people expect, and predictably. Taking the RTX 3060 12GB as a midpoint, the same card at 1440p is estimated at 105 FPS on Ultra, 130 on High, 160 on Medium and 200 on Low. That is the whole preset ladder on one card.

I am deliberately not publishing per-setting numbers — “shadows cost you 8 FPS” style claims — because I have not measured them, and inventing that level of precision is exactly what makes benchmark articles untrustworthy. What the model supports is the preset ladder above, and that is what is here.

Get the number for your exact PC

A table can only tell you what a card does next to a reference processor. Your build has a specific CPU, and in Siege that changes the answer more than it would in almost any other game. The calculator takes both.

Which graphics cards make sense for 1440p Siege

Because Siege is this well optimised, the buying advice is genuinely different from the advice for a modern single-player game — and it is worth being blunt about that rather than repeating the usual tiers.

• If you play on a 144 Hz 1440p monitor, a current mid-range card is already enough, and the money is better spent on the processor. Siege's CPU sensitivity means an older chip will cap you well before your graphics card does.
• If you play on 240 Hz, this is one of the few titles where a high-end card genuinely converts into frames you can see — but only alongside a modern CPU, and often only at Medium or Low.
• If you are buying for Siege alone, do not. Buy for the most demanding game you play; Siege will be comfortable on whatever clears that bar.

To place two specific cards against each other rather than reading a table, the GPU Compare tool puts their specs and relative performance side by side, and the Bottleneck Checker will tell you whether your processor is the thing actually holding you back — which, in this game, it often is.

Frequently asked questions