Borderlands 4 Retested – Is the game faster now?

Conclusion

Surprising results, but solid performance gains

If you use Borderlands 4’s built-in graphical presets, the game’s performance has improved across the board. At very high settings, our average framerates were boosted by over 40% from our day-1 results. Clearly, Gearbox’s optimisations have had a huge impact on Borderlands 4’s performance.

Playing the game today is much smoother than it was on day-1. Overall performance has improved, and stuttering is less frequent. This increased smoothness makes Borderlands 4 a lot more enjoyable to play today. That said, the game is still rather demanding. That said, it is vastly improved over its day-1 version. If Borderlands 4 launched like this today, there would have been much fewer complaints.

When we retested our “optimised” settings from our initial review for Borderlands 4, we found that our framerates had only marginally improved. Clearly, the areas that we optimised with our settings tweaks are the same areas where Gearbox focused its own efforts. That said, using our optimised settings still nets 38% higher average framerates than the game’s badass preset.

Borderlands 4 is still a demanding PC release. That said, the game runs with more stable framerates today and with more optimised graphical presets. This is great news for all PC gamers, especially those with lower-end hardware. That said, it still feels like there is more room for improvement. Even Gearbox has admitted (see here) that “We know we have work left to do, and we’re continuing to optimize for the future.”

You can join the discussion on Borderlands 4’s improved PC performance on the OC3D Forums.