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[Gearbox is likely pleased with the Borderlands 4 launch, which quickly broke series records for concurrent players on Steam and maintained those numbers this weekend, reaching over 304,000 players within sixteen hours. However, the company has received numerous performance complaints from PC users, voiced in more than 16,500 Steam reviews, currently rated as ‘Mixed’ with a 67% score.]
Gearbox Software co-founder and president Randy Pitchford attempted to address these performance issues [in an extensive X post], suggesting that some “4K stubborn” players either lack the hardware to run the game at Ultra HD resolution and should switch to 1440P, or prefer not to use upscalers like NVIDIA DLSS even if they have access to them.
“I know many of you are determined to play at 4K with ultra-max settings on your two-to-three-year-old hardware. Do what makes sense for you, but Borderlands 4 and Unreal Engine 5 are doing a lot, and in my view, the trade-off for frames isn’t worth it. I play at 1440P with super-high settings, and I’m very happy with that balance – the game looks amazing at 1440P. If you’re not 4K stubborn and just want a great experience with higher performance, consider running at 1440P resolution. If your graphics card is top-tier, you might be fine at 4K. But if you’re in the middle or near minimum specs, I would definitely recommend making that trade.”
“Use DLSS! Especially if you’re trying to run at resolutions higher than 1080P. This is a campaign game – you’re not competing in high-stakes esports here. The input latency is so negligible that less than .01% of the population could reliably detect it without tools in a blind test. Take the W on frame rate and use this incredible tech with DLSS on.”
Many comments from users on Steam, Reddit, X, and other social channels insist on using native rendering only. According to [Wccftech’s benchmarks], even NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card, the GeForce RTX 5090, struggles at around 48 frames per second with maxed settings and 4K resolution. However, games are no longer designed for native resolution, especially not on either PC or consoles, for quite some time now. With the latest NVIDIA DLSS transformer model and AMD FSR 4 (which can be enabled at a driver level by 9000 series users), visual quality is excellent, and performance gains are substantial.
In response to one such comment inviting Gearbox to make their game look good without AI upscaling, Pitchford replied:
“Code your own engine and show us how it’s done. We will be your customer when you pull it off. The people doing this now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing. All the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real-time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know.”
While Borderlands 4 may not look as good as it should given its hardware demands, and Gearbox has work to do in improving performance through patches, deliberately choosing to keep AI upscaling disabled feels outdated.
In other news about Borderlands 4, the studio [confirmed] there is no spyware in the game. The first PC mods have already been uploaded to Nexus, and we’ve listed a few useful ones [in this article].
