There is, generally speaking, universal praise for Borderlands 4 right now in the wake of its launch in terms of what it brings to the series.
There is also, generally speaking, universal admission that boy, this game sure runs terribly on PC, leading to a huge number of negative Steam reviews, causing the game to be Mixed there.
It’s certainly not great, with many blaming 1) the use of Unreal 5, 2) the use of Unreal 5 in an open world game like this and 3) the fact that Borderlands is usually poorly optimized at released. But there are at least some things to alleviate the awful performance, with some tips even being shared by Randy Pitchford himself, who ahead of launch, set expectations that this was probably not going to run amazingly. Well, he was right!
You will want to experiment a bit given your hardware. On my not-terribly-new 3080, these things did help, though I’m not doing all of them. In Advanced settings:
- Upscaling Method – DLSS
- Upscaling Quality – Performance
- Frame Generation – On
- Volumetric Fog – Medium or Low
You can also experiment with things like Volumetric Cloud or Shadow quality. What I ended up doing was only DLSS on Performance. Frame Gen creates a look I don’t love, as did the reduce fog which made everything a bit flat for my taste. But you may not care.
It’s better, certainly. It is not fixed. Gearbox has already issued multiple patches to try and reduce stuttering/frame drops. Compared to the review build I had, between that and these changes, it’s noticeably better, but obviously compared to a lot of other, much smoother shooters in 2025, it does stand out.
This should be priority one for Gearbox going forward, along with the crashes that are still in place. The ones I find most often happen when I have the game paused for any length of time, but I also had a crash in the final boss fight in the game where I mean, lol.
As a game, Borderlands 4 has really seemed to land with fans and even some of those totally new to the series, given that it originally started 16 years ago and Borderlands 3 was a full six years ago. It’s a good jumping on point and you don’t really need three full games of Borderlands lore in order to figure out what’s going on in the story. But if you want the whole thing to run better, try that out. Console? You’re on your own for now, most likely. I hope you get a FOV slider.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
