Rainbow Six Siege Update Will Improve Graphics And Require A Huge Download

Rainbow Six Siege has a new update on the way, and it's going to be big – literally. Depending on what platform you're on, you may be looking at download of up to 42GB. Check out the breakdown by platform, below.

So, what's this massive patch get you? The Rainbow Six Siege Y2S3.0 update will update textures, particularly on PC, where Ubisoft is promising improvements for all graphical settings. Here's the full rundown of the visual enhancements in store:

"We have adjusted the texture quality for each level of graphics settings on PC, low to Ultra. This will result in a slight increase in quality for character textures and a significant increase for environment texture quality available for all settings. The updated HD texture pack on PC will effectively be an unscaled source quality of our texture UV Maps. For players that meet the 6GB VRAM minimum to use the Ultra HD pack, you will see an additional increase in environmental texture quality."

Okay, so you're getting some fancy new textures, that partly explains the large file size, but even consoles, which won't be getting Ultra HD textures, require a pretty hefty download. What's up with that? Well, Rainbow Six Siege will also be revamping its file system, with Ubisoft promises will mean leaner downloads in the future.

"We will be making some changes to how our data is organized, as well as how we generate patches moving forward. All game data is stored in what we refer to as a "forge". This is a compressed archive containing other files. When we need to modify a file that is part of a forge, we simply download a new forge that contains the new file without replacing the original forge. Over time, it leads to a lot of wasted space on disk, as there are more and more modified files.

We decided that we need to consolidate our forges. The impact of this will result in a smaller overall footprint on your hard drive, taking up less space. By consolidating our patches and data players will see a reduction "seek time", which means faster load times for all players."

So, a big download in exchange for less disk space consumed and smaller patches going forward. Seems like a fair enough bargain. You can check out some before-and-afters showing the visual improvements you can expect from the patch, in the gallery below.

Rainbow Six Siege is currently available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. The next patch doesn't yet have a release date.