Here’s How To Improve Borderlands 4’s Performance On PC

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Since its launch last week, Borderlands 4 on PC has been criticized for its overly demanding performance and unstable behavior, which Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford has taken exception with. It’s a difficult game to get running acceptably on PC even with some cutting-edge hardware, but a few tweaks could drastically change the experience for you.

Built on Unreal Engine 5, which has developed its own negative image over fundamental performance issues, Borderlands 4 utilizes the engine’s highest presets, with performance suffering as a result. Hardware Unboxed has stepped through each of the game’s settings and identified which ones you can tweak to try to claw back performance. Unsurprisingly, the easiest way to immediately improve performance is to scale down the game’s lighting setting, which reduces the performance hit of Unreal Engine 5’s ray-traced lighting. As demonstrated in the video, it’s difficult to see differences between the games Very High and Medium settings in most scenarios, especially with Borderlands 4’s art direction, while performance can increase by over 25% when compared to the game’s highest preset.

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Several other settings, such as shadow quality, volumetric cloud quality, and more, can help to a lesser degree, but when added up, the results are impressive. With the channel’s recommended settings, you can enjoy an improvement of over 50% in average frame rate with a minimal impact on overall visual presentation, which might be the difference between playable and choppy gameplay. It’s unlikely that Gearbox is going to solve the fundamental issues that Unreal Engine presents, but there are options for the developer to improve its shader compilation before the game starts to mitigate some stutters, and further fine tune the underlying engine settings it exposes to players to bring average performance back to a more reasonable level.

Borderlands 4 is the latest entry in the popular looter shooter, with this latest iteration nailing the series’ captivating first-person action but falling short of recapturing its signature humor. In GameSpot’s 7/10 Borderlands 4 review, editor Jordan Ramée concluded, “All in all, if uncovering loot, crafting builds, and unleashing chaotic mayhem is what you’re looking for, Borderlands 4 has you covered.”

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