Borderlands 4 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Meet Borderlands 4 – Its a mess

Borderlands 4 is here, and it’s a mess

Borderlands 4 has arrived, and it is one of the most demanding PC games of 2025. Not many games can bring Nvidia’s £2,000 RTX 5090 to its knees, but this game can. That said, the game can run much faster if you are willing to adjust some graphical settings and leverage the performance advantages that upscaling can offer.

Borderlands 4 is the newest Unreal Engine 5 game to launch with significant performance issues on PC. While the game includes a shader compilation step at launch and similar steps during some loading screens, stuttering remains a frequent issue. Altering graphical settings can also cause more stuttering, making settings optimisation challenging.

Unlike its predecessor, Borderlands 4 does not have an integrated benchmarking tool. That means that you need to test your graphical settings tweaks during gameplay. Given how demanding this game is, I expect a lot of PC gamers to spend the early sections of this game constantly messing around with graphical settings.

Today, we will be looking at Borderlands 4’s PC performance across a wide range of graphics cards. For those who need them, we have some graphics optimisation tips. We will also be looking at the game’s upscaling solutions, and let you know which is the best option for you.

Drivers

To test Borderlands 4’s PC version, we used the newest GPU drivers available from AMD and Nvidia. These are AMD Software 25.9.1, and Nvidia’s GeForce 581.29 “Game Ready” driver.

OC3D Gaming Test Rig Upgrades

Thanks to Sapphire, we have been able to upgrade our gaming test suite with some AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards. For today’s analysis, we will be using Sapphire’s Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse and RX 9060 XT Pulse (16GB) graphics cards. Both GPUs are great options for playing Borderlands 4. You will be able to see how both GPUs (and many others) perform later in this article.

We are currently working to get RTX 50 series GPUs for our test suite.

See our dedicated AMD FSR 4 article for Borderlands 4 here.