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.