The long-awaited Borderlands 4 has officially launched, sending fans back into the chaotic looter-shooter universe that Gearbox made famous. While anticipation was sky-high, the conversation surrounding the game’s PC performance has been less than enthusiastic.
Even with the NVIDIA RTX 5090—the most powerful consumer GPU currently available—players are experiencing frame rate drops, stuttering, and even hard crashes. For a $3,000+ GPU, expectations were understandably higher, and many gamers are now asking a familiar question: is Borderlands 4 the new “Can it run Crysis?” benchmark?
The culprit seems to be Unreal Engine 5 and its demanding technologies like Lumen, Nanite, and World Partition. While visually stunning, these features push hardware harder than almost any other game on the market right now.
RTX 5090 vs Borderlands 4: What the Benchmarks Reveal
Players and reviewers have already run extensive tests, and the results are sobering.
- Native 4K, Badass Preset: Performance dips into the 40–50 FPS range, with noticeable stutters during firefights and traversal. For reference, this is with every setting maxed out—something the RTX 5090 usually handles without issue in other modern titles.
- DLSS 4 Performance Mode: Upscaling brings frame rates into smoother territory, but introduces blurriness and input latency. While playable, it comes at the cost of visual sharpness.
- 8K Gaming: When pushed to 8K resolution, the game becomes nearly unplayable, even with aggressive upscaling enabled. Players report sub-30 FPS results, confirming the limits of current hardware.
- Crash Reports: Multiple users have shared experiences of freezes and crashes to desktop, even on systems equipped with the latest CPUs, DDR5 RAM, and high-speed NVMe SSDs.
A widely shared YouTube benchmark video titled Borderlands 4 PC Performance is TRASH! RTX 5090 Can’t Hit … captures the frustration. In real-world gameplay, performance falls far short of expectations, even after tweaking settings.
For many, the sentiment echoes across forums and gaming subreddits: “30 FPS on an RTX 5090—this is unacceptable.”
Borderlands 4 Optimization: Why Is It So Demanding?
The poor performance isn’t just about raw GPU power. There are deeper bottlenecks at play:
1. Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen & Nanite
These next-gen rendering systems provide dynamic global illumination and micro-polygon detail that make worlds look more realistic. But they’re also CPU-intensive, meaning that even high-end processors can struggle to keep up.
2. Shader Compilation Stutter
Players report micro-stutters and long pauses when entering new areas. This is due to Unreal Engine’s shader compilation process, which loads data on the fly. Other UE5 games like The Callisto Protocol and Lords of the Fallen have suffered from similar issues.
3. Driver Maturity
Borderlands 4 is one of the first AAA titles pushing UE5 to this extreme. NVIDIA’s drivers may not yet be fully optimized for the game’s rendering pipeline. Past titles like Cyberpunk 2077 also required multiple driver updates to stabilize performance.
4. CPU Limitations
Even the fastest CPUs on the market, such as the Intel Core i9-14900KS and AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, are showing bottlenecks. Borderlands 4 often maxes out CPU cores during heavy combat scenes, leading to inconsistent frame pacing.
How Does It Compare to Other PC Games?
When stacked against other graphically demanding titles, the results highlight how poorly optimized Borderlands 4 currently is:
- Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty: With path tracing enabled, the RTX 5090 still delivers 70–80 FPS at native 4K with DLSS.
- Alan Wake 2: Known for its heavy UE5 implementation, but performs more consistently with 60+ FPS using DLSS 3.5.
- Starfield: While criticized for optimization, still achieves smoother performance at similar settings.
In other words, Borderlands 4 is an outlier—a game that seems to demand more horsepower than today’s best hardware can reasonably provide.
Developer Response: Day-One Patch and Optimization Guide
Gearbox has acknowledged the performance concerns and shipped a 2.7 GB day-one patch. Unfortunately, reports suggest only minor improvements, with stuttering and crashes persisting for many players.
The developers also published an official optimization guide on Steam, recommending the following adjustments:
- Enable DLSS 4 or FSR 3 where available
- Reduce shadow quality to medium or high
- Turn down post-processing effects
- Use Frame Generation to stabilize FPS in large combat zones
While these tweaks help, the reality is that many players expected the RTX 5090 to brute-force the game without compromise. Instead, they’re being forced into trade-offs.
Community Reactions: Frustration Across the Board
The gaming community has not held back in expressing frustration. On platforms like Reddit, discussions often highlight disbelief that a $3,000 graphics card can’t guarantee 60 FPS at 4K. Memes labeling the game as the new “Can it run Crysis?” benchmark have gone viral.
Some streamers and reviewers have gone as far as calling it the worst-optimized AAA launch of the decade, pointing out that indie developers have managed smoother UE5 implementations.
What Does This Mean for the Future of PC Gaming?
Borderlands 4’s launch exposes a growing concern in the PC gaming community: games are advancing faster than hardware and software optimization can keep up.
- For Developers: Launching a game with cutting-edge visuals but unstable performance risks damaging long-term reputation. Gearbox may need months of patches before Borderlands 4 feels polished.
- For NVIDIA & AMD: The RTX 5090 is a monster GPU, but its struggles highlight that driver support and game optimization are just as important as raw hardware power.
- For Gamers: Investing in top-end GPUs no longer guarantees flawless gameplay. Instead, expectation management and reliance on upscaling technologies (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) are becoming the norm.
Final Verdict: Borderlands 4 PC Performance Needs Major Work
Borderlands 4 is undeniably gorgeous, packed with the humor, chaos, and loot-driven gameplay fans love. However, its PC performance leaves much to be desired.
Even the NVIDIA RTX 5090—a GPU that dominates every other benchmark—struggles to deliver smooth frame rates at native 4K. Stutters, crashes, and CPU bottlenecks tarnish what should have been one of the year’s biggest gaming triumphs.
Unless Gearbox invests heavily in optimization patches, Borderlands 4 risks becoming a cautionary tale: proof that visual ambition without technical refinement can sink even the most powerful hardware.
External References & Further Reading
- Borderlands 4 Official Steam Page
- NVIDIA RTX 5090 Product Page
- PC Gamer on Unreal Engine 5 Challenges
- Reddit: r/pcgaming Borderlands 4 Discussion
- Digital Foundry: Borderlands 4 Performance Analysis
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