Tech experts say Borderlands 4 on PC has significant stutter problems, and have advised against running the game on its ‘Badass’ graphics setting.
Borderlands 4 launched big on Steam but it’s currently sat on a ‘mixed’ user review rating, mostly due to complaints about how the game runs on PC — even on high-end rigs with which PC gamers aren’t getting the graphics performance they’d expect.
Gearbox development chief Randy Pitchford has spent some time on social media addressing those complaints, even directly responding to some disgruntled fans to clap back.
Now, the tech experts at Digital Foundry have taken a look at Borderlands 4 on PC, and their initial analysis shows stutter problems that will be familiar to anyone who’s followed the discourse around Unreal Engine game performance in the last few years.
According to DF’s Alex Battaglia, shader compilation stutter (you’ve probably noticed Borderlands 4 spends time compiling shaders as you wait to load the game) can cause stutter when the engine does something for the first time in a new area, like your character picking up a new type of weapon or having an enemy perform a new death animation.
PC gamers have complained about Unreal Engine game stutter for some time now, but last month Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney (Epic, the developer of Fortnite, makes Unreal Engine) suggested the way developers were making their Unreal Engine 5 games was to blame.
Whoever’s to blame, for Borderlands 4, the stutter issue “makes the experience feel less polished,” Battaglia said.
Borderlands’ Vault Hunters, Ranked
Borderlands’ Vault Hunters, Ranked
He also noted that vegetation starts to animate as you get closer, and it does “this very obvious flip when it does it and it looks like an LOD is changing.”
“I have no idea why they did it this way,” Battaglia said. “When you’re walking through the world and there’s a lot of grass on the ground you’ll see a lot of what looks like pop-in occurring. That’s actually just the animation turning on. So if you do see pop-in, it’s probably not pop-in in the traditional sense, but just the vegetation turning on to animate. It’s a little weird looking.”
Meanwhile, real-time cutscenes are limited to 30fps, which is a “bit bizarre” because you can abruptly crash to 30 from a higher framerate in gameplay, “which seems a little out of place in a first-person game.”
DF chief Rich Leadbetter pointed out that Battaglia experienced stutter “on the fastest gaming CPU that money can buy” during the team’s testing, suggesting there’s a significant issue here.
Meanwhile, DF commented on the ongoing complaints from PC players about the performance of the game, even on powerful PCs. Battaglia warned against running Borderlands 4 on what’s called the ‘Badass’ graphics preset, even if your PC should be able to handle it, because what you get from Badass doesn’t justify using it over ‘Very High.’
“On the higher levels, I definitely don’t think you should be turning this game up to Badass,” Battaglia said. “It is woefully inefficient on the Epic setting. It is not good to use. That’s really placebo level stuff, usually. There’s probably some middle ground there that’ll give you a better visual experience.”
DF’s John Linneman added: “This one does seem to be running worse than usual for an Unreal Engine 5 game. It is below where it seems like it should be given how other games using this engine perform.”
According to DF, the recently released PC update — the one with no patch notes — does not appear to have improved matters. Gearbox has said it will continue to update the game, but PC players will be hoping meaningful patches arrive sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, Gearbox has posted a Borderlands 4 Nvidia Optimization guide on Steam, advising players how to optimize their graphics settings for “better performance and framerates” on PC with the Nvidia app. Gearbox has also issued a piece of advice to PC gamers that to me reads like an effort to prevent players from making knee-jerk reactions to the game’s performance as soon as they’ve changed their settings: “Please note that any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile. Please keep playing for at least 15 minutes to see how your PC’s performance has changed.”
If you are delving into Borderlands 4, don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
