The 'new era' of Rainbow Six Siege means you're going to need some newer hardware if you want to play

Announced in February, Rainbow Six Siege X makes some major changes to Ubisoft's venerable team-based shooter, including a move to free-to-play (kind of) and its first permanent mode in a decade. And yes, with 10 years under the bridge it also comes to the table with some new and rather more demanding hardware requirements.

Rainbow Six Siege X isn't quite a sequel, although it is somewhat confusingly described as an "update to the existing game, to a new game"—joining the ambiguous ranks of Overwatch 2 and Hunt: Showdown 1896. The bottom line is that along with the various gameplay and monetization changes, there are also significant visual upgrades, and thus hardware upgrades may also be required if you've been white-knuckling it through Siege's OG minimum requirements. To play in the "new era" of Rainbow Six Siege, you'll need something a bit beefier:

Minimum (1080p, 60 fps)

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3100, Intel i3 8100
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 1650 4GB, AMD RX 5500XT 4GB, Intel ARC A380 6GB
• RAM: 8GB
• OS: Windows 10/11, DirectX 12
• Storage: 65 GB SSD

High (1080p, 120 fps Core Siege, 60 fps Dual Front)

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Intel i5 10400
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB, AMD RX 6600 8GB
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 11, DirectX 12
• Storage: 65 GB SSD

High (1440p, 120 fps Core Siege, 60 fps Dual Front)

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Intel i5 10400
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 3070 8GB, AMD RX 6700 XT 8GB
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 11, DirectX 12
• Storage: 65 GB SSD

High (2160p, 120 fps Core Siege, 60 fps Dual Front)

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, Intel i5 11600K
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB, AMD RX 6800 XT 16GB
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 11, DirectX 12
• Storage: 65 GB SSD

Ultra (2160p, 120 fps)

• CPU: AMD Ryzen5 5600X, Intel i5-11600K
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB, AMD RTX 7900 XT 20GB
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 11, DirectX 12
• Storage: 110 GB SSD

The minimum spec isn't too punishing, and at the risk of revealing myself as a casual I'd say 1080p at 60 fps is fine. The main thing to note here is the varying framerate targets of "Core Siege", which is basically the standard 5v5 mode, and "Dual Front", the new 6v6 mode that takes place on a bigger map. More serious players are probably going to want to aim a little higher, but even the 1440p/120 fps spec is relatively mid-range for a gaming PC these days—more is always better, but you hopefully won't need to break the bank on a system-wide upgrade in order to get a decent Rainbow Six Siege X experience.

Unless, as I said, you're still scraping by on those original minimals from 2015:

• Supported OS - Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64 bit versions required)
• Processor - Intel Core i3 560 @ 3.3 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 945 @ 3.0 GHz
• RAM - 6GB
• Video Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 5870 (DirectX-11 compliant with 1GB of VRAM)
• DVD ROM Drive - DVD-ROM Dual Layer
• Sound - DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
• Hard Drive - 30GB
• Multiplayer - Broadband connection with 256kbps upstream or faster

Man, I miss the days when optical drives were part of system requirements.

Rainbow Six Siege X is set to go fully live on June 10, but you can get an early look at what's coming via a test server open to all current Rainbow Six Siege owners that's live now and set to run until June 9.