Do this to fix Rainbow 6 Siege crashing when starting a new game

Rainbow 6 Siege players have been reporting that they’re facing constant crashes or the game freezes each time they try starting a new game. The problem seems to have cropped up in the past few hours and frustrated players have taken to Reddit, X, and the Ubisoft forums to seek explanations.

Affected players claim that when the game freezes, they can still hear audio cues, but the screen remains frozen or gets stuck on a black screen. I’ve added some reports from players for reference:

Hey today my game started to freeze up at random times. It freezes my screen but I can still walk and shoot normally but my screen is frozen image. I tried verifying files and reinstalling game but that didn´t work. How do I fix that? (Source)

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Can you guys please fix the crashing issue you i was going crazy earlier thinking it was my pc so fix this glitch i can’t even load 20 secs into the match without it freezing and then crashing (Source)

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Every time i play quick match, no matter what side or map, my game will randomly freeze unable to move but i can hear all audio. if i try to tab out and go back in it will black screen and i have to close out of r6. (Source)

Adding salt to their wounds, some players are claiming that the game freezing as soon as they start a new game has even resulted in them getting banned for an hour or so. Furthermore, general troubleshooting tips don’t seem to help in this situation. Players have tried restarting their computers, verifying the game files etc. to no avail.

But after reading dozens of comments from affected players, it seems there are at least two potential workarounds that you can try out to fixed the problem. The first is to launch the game with Vulkan. Here’s how a Redditor explained it:

Steam should ask you at the launch of the game, if you want to run “Rainbow Six Siege” or “Rainbow Six Siege Vulkan”

Alternatively make a right click on the game, open “properties,” there should be an option to pick the default launch mode.(Not home right now, cant tell you exactly where the setting is hidden)

If you feel fancy, you could enter “-vulkan” as a launch option within the “General” tab. Or just launch the “RainbowSix_Vulkan.exe” within the games main directory.

Another fix that seems to have worked for everyone that tried it is to simply end all Discord processes and launch the game. It’s unclear what’s causing Discord to crash Rainbow 6 Siege, but running the game without Discord working in the background stops the game from freezing. If you want to take less extreme measures, simply disable Discord overlay. Go to User Settings > Game Overlay > Disable Game Overlay. Give this a shot before killing all Discord processes to see if the game works.

Ubisoft hasn’t acknowledged the issue yet, so it’s unclear if and when a fix will be released or if the problem is entirely due to a faulty Discord update. We’ll keep an eye out for any further developments and will update the article with the details. In the meantime, feel free to let us know if the workarounds suggested above helped fix the problem or not.