It’s been a tough first day on the workplace for Borderlands 4, which has launched amid adware denials and widespread person stories of dodgy PC efficiency. That being crashing, stuttering, the standard Unreal Engine 5 hassle on the mill. Framerate-related grumbling specifically has prompted a Steam submit from Gearbox, presenting a setting-by-setting information to optimisation on GeForce graphics playing cards that their buddies at Nvidia put collectively.
First off, oi, that’s my job. Second, I say “prompted”, however the sheer variety of GPUs it covers – individually for 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions – has produced settings tables so wealthy in cells that it’s way more probably a sweating intern has spent the complete previous week cranking these out. No disrespect, clearly. Solidarity to benchmarkers. However, are these guides dependable?
Let’s begin by taking a my god, take a look at the scale of it.
Possibly the textual content model additional down the submit is extra simply readable?
Ah. JPG it’s then, the place we will see that even at 1080p, Borderlands 4 thinks it’s best to run it with each DLSS upscaling and body era. I booted up the RPS Take a look at Rig with an 8GB RTX 4060 Ti, one of many included playing cards, and settled down in one of many extra demanding open world areas for a spot of corroboration.
And sure, DLSS – or the GPU-supported upscaler of your selecting – is clearly meant as customary process. With body gen disabled and Nvidia’s prompt settings in place, I used to be averaging 99fps, however switching off High quality-level DLSS and operating at native 1080p noticed that stoop to 62fps.
Body gen itself, in the meantime, is simply bizarre. It did get my common framerate as much as 148fps (visually, anyway – solely 90 to 95 of these have been ‘actual’ frames) however movement didn’t seem any smoother. In truth, it gained a harsher, grittier high quality that didn’t look dissimilar to a decrease framerate. I’ve seen this occur with much less superior upscalers like the unique FSR 3.0, however by no means with the brand new and improved DLSS 4.
In any other case, Gearbox/Nvidia’s settings information for the RTX 4060 Ti is respectable, if a bit of extreme. I’m undecided it wants such deep cuts to volumetric clouds and the primary shadow high quality choices, each of which produced negligible variations between their highest and lowest settings in my testing. Foliage density, volumetric fog, and directional shadows all have barely greater framerate impacts, however I solely misplaced 3-5fps apiece by toggling them to Very Excessive. Which, by the by, is price making an attempt for foliage, given how naked the sport seems to be with out its veggies.
Nonetheless, the information does accurately determine these as leveraging some stage of efficiency tax, and I’d need to agree with it protecting lighting high quality on Low. This is likely one of the heaviest settings of the bunch, with my RTX 4060 Ti falling from 99fps to 74fps after altering this single setting as much as Very Excessive, with surprisingly little acquire when it comes to visible niceness. Body gen stays a no-no, however honest dos, you’d be getting a extra fined-tuned Borderlands 4 with these than any of the presets.
Sadly, a great displaying for Gearbox’s large Excel undertaking in the end doesn’t actually deal with its efficiency issues. I haven’t had any crashes but however stuttering is, certainly, a standard incidence, particularly throughout large fights the place a number of baddies are onscreen and a few method of elemental particle impact twister is blowing by means of them. Which, this being a Borderlands recreation, is most fights. Though larger framerates may also help masks the impact, it doesn’t appear that you would be able to utterly stutter-proof your PC, even with pre-tailored settings suggestions.
Maybe unsurprisingly, then, it doesn’t pay to attempt skirting beneath the system necessities. I had a cheeky go on my RTX 4050 laptop computer, the 8GB system RAM and 6GB VRAM of which come beneath the official minimums, and even DLSS wasn’t sufficient to remain above 30fps within the open world. With, naturally, loads of large stutters alongside the way in which.
Whether or not you’re enjoying Borderlands 4 or not, we’re all uncomfortably acquainted with the issue at this level. It’s one which’s frayed the sides of video games, uncommon Unreal Engine 5 ones, from current releases Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and Dune: Awakening again to the likes of Remnant II and past. We additionally know by now, as Gearbox and 2K ought to, that it’s not one thing that may be fastened on our finish by altering a couple of settings.
