Borderlands 4 recommended specs call for an RTX 3080 and 32GB RAM

[midian182]

A hot potato: Now that people are no longer angry over Borderlands 4 possibly costing $80 (it's actually $70 for the standard edition), something else is causing plenty of outrage: the game's PC requirements. Asking for an RTX 3080 as the recommended GPU does seem excessive, and even the minimum specs are higher than expected.

Borderlands 4's system requirements on its Steam page are certainly higher than one would expect. Even the bare minimum requirements, where we usually see ancient and/or very low-end hardware, ask for at least an Intel Core i7-9700 or an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, paired with a GeForce RTX 2070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT.

The additional notes state that a processor with a minimum of eight CPU cores is a requirement.

The recommended requirements are even worse. The 16GB system RAM goes up to 32GB, and that's only the start. The minimum processor is an Intel Core i7-12700 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, while the GPU is at least an RTX 3080 / RX 6800 XT.

According to the notes at this level, 8+ CPU cores are a requirement, as is a "12GB+" graphics card. It's also a storage-hungry game, asking for 100GB of free SSD space.

Borderlands 4 is another of the new wave of Unreal Engine 5-powered games, which often have demanding requirements. It will also feature Denuvo and Symbiote DRM, potentially affecting the performance even further.

Some Redditors say they can't understand the outcry, given that the RTX 3080 is five years old. But it remains a high-end card, and the top twelve most-popular GPUs on the Steam survey are from the xx50 and xx60 series. Moreover, 32GB for the recommended RAM is double the usual 16GB.

Borderlands 4 doesn't arrive until September 12 – on both Steam and the Epic Games Store on PC – so Gearbox could change the specs after some more optimization before then.

While the PC specs are causing consternation, fans of the series were pleased to learn that the potential $80 price tag, which many believed it would carry, never materialized. The base game is the usual $70, though you can always spend $100 on the Deluxe Edition or a whopping $130 on the Super Deluxe Edition.

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Borderlands 4 recommended specs call for an RTX 3080 and 32GB RAM

 

[QuaZulu]

"so Gearbox could change the specs after some more optimization before then"
Sounds like Gearbox still has some significant work to do!

 

[NumberNine]

Those are development hardware specs.
They didn't finish the game before launch.

Either way, Gearbox doesn't get money from me anymore so they can do whatever they want.

 

[techstrike]

Super High required GPU specs, just for the show of cartoon like low textured 3D graphics ...

no, thanks.

 

[BadThad]

Game hardware requirement specs can be taken with a grain of salt. Very few are accurate if you just turn down the graphics/games settings. Now, coding the requirement into the game so it won't run on lesser hardware, that's another issue. But I've seen many modern games run on less than the recommended/minimum hardware over and over for decades.

 

[Gezzer]

Hardware specifications are a strange beast. Minimum is less about what the software will run on and more about the cut off point for support staff troubleshooting. Don't have minimum they might try to help with an issue, but most likely won't. But the software/game might still do alright on a highly tuned and optimized lower end system.

Recommended is usually what the developers would consider the experience they were shooting for. So I don't see either spec as being too out of line. Well except for the 8 core requirement for minimum. But I don't know if that's a hard limit or if a highly clocked 6 core might work as well. And that's the problem IMHO we won't really know until someone tries running the game on a 6 core or lower system.

Either way the day of 4 core AAA games is likely drawing to a close no matter what the clock speed is. The bigger question for me is the extra core count due to more complicated and resource heavy systems, or just a lack of good optimization? Either one is plausible, but I do feel that time restraints cause less of an emphasis on getting the best performance possible. Instead just rely on higher end hardware to make up the shortcoming.

 

[gamerk2]

Recommended is usually what the developers would consider the experience they were shooting for. So I don't see either spec as being too out of line. Well except for the 8 core requirement for minimum. But I don't know if that's a hard limit or if a highly clocked 6 core might work as well. And that's the problem IMHO we won't really know until someone tries running the game on a 6 core or lower system.

I remember when games first started to mandate Quad Cores; I think Skyrim was one of the first. This was achieved by (and I can't stress how stupid a design this was) forcing one of the threads on to Core 3. Hackers found that if you forced that thread on to some other core of a fast dual-core (say, an OCd E8800) that game not only ran fine, but ran better then it did on slower quad core CPUs. So we'll see.

And lets not get started on P versus E cores, which farther muddles things.