It’s not uncommon for games to suffer from performance issues at launch, but Borderland 4 Find yourself in a unique position. This is because CEO Randy Pitchford is busy making bold claims about gamers and PC hardware on social media, using customer service data to deny the issue is widespread.
Well, I finally had the opportunity to offer Borderlands 4 on my PC using the RTX 4070 test rig. This was used to benchmark all the latest releases and my experience was not positive. Considering Randy’s arguments about gamers who expect to run ultra high graphics on low spec PCs, I ran the game on Medium Graphics Preset, presenting data and general experience. Our rig may not use the best graphics cards or CPU, but it is still a very capable gaming PC, running the latest releases at decent frame rates of 1080p and 1440p.
My time test Borderlands 4 took 15 minutes and 35 seconds to the shader compilation and waited endlessly for the game to log in. I checked the game files and allowed the game through a firewall. and I ran the game as an administrator, but I wasn’t past this endless “Login” screen.
By this point I have already been over 30 minutes to try and play Borderlands 4 and can’t even reach the main menu that is far from ideal. As a 10 year old and 10 month old parent, my game time was already short so dealing with dangerous menus and excessively long shader compilations was extremely frustrating. The fix for this issue was that it appears to restart my entire PC. This finally made me pass the scary login screen.
After checking that the game was set to Media Graphics Presets in NVIDIA DLSS set to Quality, I started playing Borderlands 4. In the first gameplay section, performances are on the way to the first boss battle. UnderstoodHowever, there were frequent frame rate drops when entering combat and during firefighting. The more you try to use Borderland’s movement mechanism for your own benefit, the less performance will occur.
When I tested the Scathe boss of the watchman at three resolutions, my average frame rate was 72fps at 1080p, 61fps at 1440p and 46fps at 4k. This fight was the easiest section within the opening section of Borderlands 4, and was able to test each resolution quite a bit. The 1% lows at each resolution were 52fps, 37fps, and 25fps, respectively. There was a noticeable utter sound at each resolution, which was generally reflected at a low 1% low, so I’ll touch it again soon.
According to the requirements for the Borderlands 4 system, our test rig is shy about meeting the recommended specifications for playing at 1440p at 60fps, but still, to handle these settings, we would expect a 2-year-old $599 Nvidia GPU paired with an 11th generation Intel CPU to handle these settings, even if it is not officially listed in the requirements.
However, performance only got worse if you reached the open world part of the game. As soon as the tour of Claptrap’s camp was over, they were able to roam freely, performance drastically degraded and the stud sound became even worse.
Average frame rates dropped to 62fps at 1080p, 53fps at 1440p and just 23fps at 4k. The 1% low also suffered, dropping to 37fps, 26fps and 14fps, respectively. If it’s Randy, it spins it, but Borderlands shouldn’t drop at 37fps at 1080p on an RTX 4070 with medium graphics settings.
Without DLSS, the average drops to 56fps, 50fps, and 20fps, with 1% dropping to 32fps, 23fps, and 14fps. With or without upscaling, these numbers are disastrous, especially at 1% lows. At both 1440p, this number is not accepted. It shows how hard the game is. For context, when testing single-player shooters, you usually set the bar as an average of 60fps and 45fps 1% lower.
Instead, it shows that there are frequent moments when the game struggles to handle what’s going on on-screen, let alone 45fps, which is well below 30fps.
Even if you’re just navigating the open world and trying to actively avoid combat, you’ll notice lighting issues such as big texture pop-ins, objects disappearing from the game’s world, and constant flickering. A huge number of areas in Borderlands 4 are under-optimized and previous responses appear as scrambles to avoid responsibility.
Despite the problems I encountered, I don’t think Borderlands 4 is far from being a great game in terms of performance. You’ll need some performance-focused patches or hotfixes, but the sooner these are available, the more you can get back to the game.
However, in its current state, if you engage in combat, which is a basic part of the game, you will not be able to play the game. For now, I would rather spend my time playing a properly optimized game without any performance frustration.
Are you struggling to perform in Borderlands 4 or does the game run well? Please let us know via Community Discord Server.
