Borderlands 4 launches to 'Mixed' Steam rating due to performance issues and bugs

[midian182]

WTF?! The eagerly anticipated Borderlands 4 has finally arrived. The looter shooter has received reviews that range from good to excellent, with only a few negative ones. But you wouldn't think that was the case based on its 'Mixed' Steam rating. Unsurprisingly, the majority of complaints are over its performance – even with high-end hardware – and the bugs.

Just 62% of the 5,763 Steam reviews for Borderlands 4 are positive. The most-upvoted reviews summarize the problems best: huge performance issues and game-breaking bugs.

The optimization in the Unreal Engine 5-powered Borderlands 4 seems particularly bad. Even the flagship RTX 5090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D averages around 40 fps at native 4K – and that's during indoor sections.

Publisher 2K Games has now updated Borderlands 4's community page with extensive optimization charts for playing at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. To give you an idea of what to expect, getting more than 60 FPS at 1440p using the mighty RTX 5080 requires DLSS set to Balanced and 4x (I.e., maximum) Frame Generation enabled. Want more than 60fps at 4K with this card? That requires DLSS at Performance level and reduced graphical settings.

"Turned it down to Low graphics presents [sic] and couldn't hit 60 FPS, even with FSR upscaling on my RX 6900 XT," writes one reviewer.

Developer Gearbox had previously recommended an RTX 3080/AMD RX 6800 XT/Intel Arc B580 for Borderlands 4, though it never gave any specifics about resolutions or settings.

In addition to the performance problems, there are plenty of complaints about the game crashing. "None of my friends can get the game to start past the main menu. When you quit and restart, it doesn't close the original instance, and it still uses full memory," reads one of the top-rated reviews.

Gearbox pushed out a 2.7GB day-one patch, and while it did address some of the issues – the Steam rating was initially Mostly Negative – plenty remain. The company has also recommended playing the game for at least 15 minutes after altering graphics settings to give shaders time to recompile.

The problems are a shame as many have praised Borderlands 4 for its gameplay and gunplay, clever bosses, and open-world; more than one reviewer has called it the best game in the entire franchise. But all that counts for little when a title doesn't play very well – or at all.

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Borderlands 4 launches to 'Mixed' Steam rating due to performance issues and bugs

 

[nnguy2]

More and more unoptimized messes.

 

[EvilRebar]

I've hit an age where I play most games solo and have a huge backlog, so I just wait for these releases to get patched into usability and released in a GOTY edition with freebies.

Buying at launch is for suckers and MMO players.

 

[Hexic]

I've hit an age where I play most games solo and have a huge backlog, so I just wait for these releases to get patched into usability and released in a GOTY edition with freebies.

Buying at launch is for suckers and MMO players.

As an MMO player, I’m used to the disappointment.

 

[WhiteLeaff]

No one would expect anything different from the stutter engine.

 

[KedsDead]

I've hit an age where I play most games solo and have a huge backlog, so I just wait for these releases to get patched into usability and released in a GOTY edition with freebies.

Buying at launch is for suckers and MMO players.

I am in the same boat.. I tend to wait for them to end up on sale on steam or for Epic to give them away for free.

 

[Burty117]

Honestly Gearbox, you lost yourself a lot of sales, There's a couple of groups I know of who were all ready to buy the game on launch if it was good and playable. Sounds like the game is good, but performance issues makes it too close to unplayable.

Soo now both groups are just going to wait it out until you've patched it, got rid of Denuvo and it's on sale.

Well done Gearbox... Well Done...

 

[gdavid65]

I'll play the game when it's $30 and they have fixed the bugs, not $80 friggin bucks

 

[brunocasarini]

A highly anticipated game from a famous developer is released with bugs and performance issues: welcome to the new normal.

 

[brunocasarini]

I've hit an age where I play most games solo and have a huge backlog, so I just wait for these releases to get patched into usability and released in a GOTY edition with freebies.

Buying at launch is for suckers and MMO players.

So do I.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

I can't comment personally on how Borderlands 4 looks since I don't own it, but looking at still images it really doesn't look any different than the third entry, yet it runs like crap. Sounds like an awesome game!

Were I to try and play at 1440p they say I need DLSS balanced (so that makes it actually closer to 720p) and all settings turned to pretty much medium with my 3080Ti.

I need to play the game at 720p with settings on medium so I can get around 60fps? What a joke. Get your crap out of here.

Here's a new slogan for Borderlands 4:

Borderlands 4, looks like Borderlands 3, but runs like crap!

 

[godrilla]

Gamers are having Unreal Engine fatigue with all this beta testing at a premium!

 

[Billybobjoey]

The company has also recommended playing the game for at least 15 minutes after altering graphics settings to give shaders time to recompile.

Wow, yet another unreal engine game with shader issues. We should be past this by now, it's been years since this started cropping up on unreal 4.

 

[yRaz]

Wow, yet another unreal engine game with shader issues. We should be past this by now, it's been years since this started cropping up on unreal 4.

The worst part is that they know what the issue is, stuff you can't see is being rendered. They say the solution is for devs to fix it, but they have had years to address an automatic fix for it. Something that is done automatically by the engine without anyone's input. They certainly have the resources so why this has gone in addeassed for so long boggles my mind

 

[axiomatic13]

Animators not setting normals for the textures? Oh the huge manatee. This has been going on since the invention of 3D. It's pure lazy work. Back when I was animating, (Mechwarrior 2 / Black Knight) you could not check in your 3D asset until a senior artist checked your normals, otherwise the game engine devs would become angry with you for making the engine work too hard.

 

[Tam 212]

More and more unoptimized messes.

Liked with one revision.

"More and more unoptimized Unreal Engine messes".

 

[toooooot]

On one side, I feel sorry for people who paid full price. On the other side, this is u5. Every wild animal knows that it requires newer gen GPU. People expect it to run on their ancient GPUs, many use resolution above 1080p. I learned early on that anything above 2k was too heavy on my watercooled gtx1080. And it was long time ago when it was still a formidable GPU.

 

[Watzupken]

Tim said, “problem is with the developers”. But the more games that’s using Unreal Engine 5, the more it’s becoming apparent that the game engine IS the problem. The visual upgrade is nothing spectacular, but the performance hit is incredible. As someone also pointed out, the Unreal Engine 5 demos by Epic runs very poorly on high end hardware as well. Game developers clearly deprioritised optimisation, but the game engine is terrible.

 

[brucek]

I held my nose, applied Nvidia's recommended settings, and have been enjoying the game since. I don't love DLSS being the new normal to do anything but as for right now I'd rather play the game then put my foot down over it.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Ridiculous.

I'm all for extra high "ultra" settings for 5090 owners and for future GPUs to spread their wings.

But a the current xx80 card should be able to hit 60FPS at 1440p WITHOUT fake frames.

A 5080 needing DLSS balanced + 4X fake frames + turning down Lighting Quality to just hit what most consider playable framerates is crazypants. Does that mean it's at only at 15 FPS without frame-gen?!?!

 

[mbk34]

Perhaps developers should be given more run of the mill hardware to develop on? Giving them 9800X3D processors and 5090 GPUs just makes them lazy. Perhaps, before doing internal group demos, they should have some aspect of the demo machine randomly handicapped ie 8GB RAM or a disabling all but 4 cores on the processor or switching out the GPU to a lesser model.

 

[godrilla]

For reference Borderlands 3 ran on potato level hardware 4k almost 60 fps on rx 6800 non xt. fyi

 

[Burty117]

For reference Borderlands 3 ran on potato level hardware 4k almost 60 fps on rx 6800 non xt. fyiView attachment 90668

You consider RX 6800 "Potato Hardware"??

 

[ScottSoapbox]

With upscaling it isn't as bad as the chart requiring 4X frame gen implied (see pic).

But it's still pretty bad.

I like to play at least at 1440p, Very High settings, DLSS Quality (or off), and 90+ FPS.

Very High gives +10% from Badassery (https://www.techpowerup.com/review/borderlands-4-performance-benchmark/4.html) and 5080 is another +12% on average. So...

5070 TI at 1440p, Very High, DLSS Quality = 79 FPS
5080 at 1440p, Very High, DLSS Quality = 89 FPS

$1000+ GPU can almost reach my minimum "playability" threshold. Crazy.

It's also wild how little lowering the resolution or upscaling sample res helps. Something is definitely broken. I'm not sure if that gives us more or less hope for the chances of improvements.

 

[godrilla]

You consider RX 6800 "Potato Hardware"??

No but it came out 5 years ago and was considered upper midrange vs the 6900xt and 6950xt. We are 2 generations past rdna 2 now. According to unreal engine 5 it is considered potato level hardware. 7700xt similar performance gets around 40 fps at 1080p.