Borderlands 3 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

DirectX 12 is Broken, and fixing it can yield PC gamers huge benefits

Borderlands 3 has launched with terrible DirectX 12 support. There is no other way of putting it. During that game’s launch weekend, one of our more popular articles was a short guide on how to switch the game back to DirectX 11 mode. This brief guide can be read here. 

As it stands, Borderlands 3 can take up to 5 minutes to boot up under DirectX 12. Some users have reported that the game can completely fail to boot. Beyond that, the game also fails to run at 4K under DirectX 12 on 8GB graphics cards, with the game giving a VRAM related error. The game runs fine at 4K on the same graphics cards under DirectX 11. 

Below we will share some DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 benchmarks using our Nvidia Geforce RTX Founders Edition and AMD’s Reference RX Vega 56, RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics cards. In the case of the RTX 2080 Ti, we know that the game is CPU limited under DirectX 11, with the move to DX12 significantly increasing the game’s minimum and average framerates. With the RX Vega 56 and Navi cards, we can also see that Radeon GPUs also benefit from DirectX 12. Radeon’s performance benefits stem from the game’s support for Asynchronous Compute. 

Looking at the remainder of Nvidia’s RTX 20 series, we can see that all cards except the RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Ti, see lower levels of game performance. These differences are minor, but reveals Nvidia’s weaker DirectX 12 support within the game. The RTX 2080 Super and TX 2080 Ti Super’s performance gains are likely from CPU related performance gains. 

Borderlands 3 can run a lot better using DirectX 12; but as it stands, the game’s DirectX 12 mode isn’t worth using. Between framerate stutters and boot issues, it is safer to stick with DirectX 11 for now. 

Gearbox has already confirmed that a “final” DX12 implementation is coming to Borderlands 3 in a future patch.