Borderlands 4 PC Performance Benchmarks: The Best-Looking Borderlands To Date, But Also The Most Demanding To Run

Borderlands 4 is the latest looter-shooter from the crazy minds at Gearbox, and the newest installment is one of the best-looking "Borderlands" to date, but also the heaviest to run on PC, so here are our PC benchmarks.

Borderlands 4 PC Benchmarks: Upscaling & Frame-Gen A Must To Run The Latest Looter-Shooter At A Playable FPS, Visually Looks Stunning

[Update - 9/14/25] - Gearbox has released a new patch to improve the performance on PC in Borderlands 4. We have tried out the new patch and saw around 10-15% improvement in FPS. Plus, it also brings a lot of stability versus launch.

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We hope you're having a blast in Borderlands 4. The team is loving seeing you all shooting and looting your way through Kairos.

Today we're releasing a new update to help improve stability for a wide range of PCs.

Read the full notes here - https://t.co/VdWxfNnUJ3 pic.twitter.com/qeaRyKUieY

— Borderlands (@Borderlands) September 14, 2025

Borderlands is the fourth installment in the "Borderlands" franchise. I have been a long-time fan of the series, with Borderlands 2 being one of my favourite FPS titles to date. The series is known for utilizing cel-shading, a technique commonly used in animations that gives the appearance of a hand-drawn image. In the Borderlands franchise, cel-shading can easily be seen in the various objects and scenery that have black outlines. Through some ini tweaks, you can remove these black "Cel-Shaded" lines altogether, but it is what gives the Borderlands series its distinctive touch.

Besides that, the Borderlands series has remained true to its core of being a looter-shooter, with countless weapons and items to loot. The developer has historically used terms such as "Bazillion" & "Gajillion" weapons as a testament to its endless variety of weapons that are featured in the game, each with its own unique perks and shooting styles.

Borderlands 4 PC In-Game Settings

So, starting with the Borderlands 4 PC performance benchmarks, we first want to glance over the in-game settings. Just like any modern PC title, the game features a handful of options to select from. These can be accessed from the "Visuals" panel.

The "Basic" panel allows users to configure:

• Display Mode (Fullscreen/Windows/Borderless)
• Display Resolution
• Display Stats (None/FPS/All)
• Limit Frame Rate (Off/On)
• Custom FPS Limit
• Vertical Sync
• Calibrate Display
• Calibrate HUD Area
• Field of View (Default 90 / Up To 110)
• Vehicle Field of View (Default 90 / Up To 110)

The "Advanced" panel is where you can really tinker with each setting. An informative panel on the right side gives more details for each setting. You can set between five graphics presets, with the highest tier being "Badass," which turns everything to max, or you can use the Auto-Detect Graphics Preset, which analyzes your PC specs and configures the settings around them. You also get the option to enable or disable Anti-Aliasing (do note that this option will be disabled if you are using an upscaling mode).

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A good thing about Borderlands 4 is that it features several Upscaling Methods. There's TSR, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. Upscaling quality can also be configured down to "Ultra Performance" and up to "Full Resolution Native" modes. For those who don't have modern hardware that supports the latest Upscaling Quality Methods, there's also spatial upscaling. You can also tweak the Scene Capture Quality.

Frame-Generation is also supported in the game, which is supported on all GPUs, though NVIDIA RTX 50 GPUs get MFG support in 2x, 3x, and 4x mode. You can also enable NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency mode.

Moving on to Environment settings, the game offers:

• HLOD Loading Range
• Geometry Quality
• Texture Quality
• Textures Streaming Speed
• Anisotropic Filtering Quality
• Foliage Density
• Volumetric Fog
• Volumetric Cloud
• Shadow Quality
• Directional Shadow Quality
• Volumetric Cloud Shadows
• Lightning Quality
• Reflections Quality
• Shading Quality

Lastly, there are three post-processing settings, which include:

• Post-Process Quality
• Motion Blur Amount
• Motion Blur Quality

Borderlands 4 PC PC Performance Benchmarks

Coming to performance, we first want to share the native results. As you can see, none of the GPUs, even the flagship RTX 5090, manage 60 FPS at 4K natively. The card sits at 48 FPS on average, leaving the other cards in the mid-30s and even single-digit FPS range.

It's only at 1440p native resolution that a few cards, such as the RTX 5090 and RTX 4090, can manage over 60 FPS. The other cards are now in the mid-40s to low 20s range.

At 1080p, cards such as the 4070 Ti and above can deliver 60 FPS, while the rest of the mainstream GPUs deliver around mid-30s to mid-20s FPS.

That brings us to upscaling. With DLSS/FSR/XeSS, the game is heavily dependent on upscaling techniques to achieve a playable FPS. Once again, even with Quality DLSS enabled, the RTX 5090 only manages 74 FPS while the RTX 4090 manages just 54 FPS at 4K.

At 1440p, you can get 60+ FPS on a wider range of GPUs with upscaling enabled. Cards such as the RTX 5070 and above can offer decent FPS, but even then, it should be mentioned that areas that are combat-heavy with lots of action and explosions happening, a staple of the series, can lead to FPS drops in the 50s-40s range.

At 1080p with upscaling set to Quality, cards such as the RTX 4060 Ti and above can deliver over 60 FPS. 5060 and 4060 users will either have to rely on frame-gen or lower visual quality to achieve 60 FPS.

And finally, we have frame-generation added to the equation. For those who want to really utilize their high-refresh-rate gaming monitors, you have to turn Frame-Gen on, especially the 3x or 4x mode on RTX 50 series cards.

Following is the VRAM utilization in the game at each respective resolution:

Borderlands 4 PC PC Impressions

So the first thoughts about Borderlands 4 on PC are that it is not only the best-looking Borderlands title to date, but it's also the most intensive on hardware resources. Borderlands 4 can easily take the title of the heaviest game to release in 2025. It might be due to the open-world setting and the amount of action going on, which has easily been quadrupled from previous franchises.

The game is based on Unreal Engine 5, which has had its own troubles with almost every title that used it. Traversal stutters are still here, and you can notice them; plus, the game is not only heavy on GPUs but also on CPUs. There wasn't a single moment when my CPU didn't sit below 85 °C. The P-Cores on the i9-13900K are being hit the hardest, and utilization is heavy across the board.

The game does feature a Shader Compilation process at the beginning, which took me around 1 minute to complete (however it should take up to 15 minutes on average for the majority of PCs), but it should be worrisome for those who are running degraded Intel 13th/14th Gen chips, as not running the chip at the default configuration might lead to crashes or hard PC resets.

Another thing that I noticed is that enabling frame generation has an impact on the smoothness of the game. The higher latency leads to irregular weapon movement, which is only stabilized by enabling V-Sync. There's also no toggle to switch off Ray Tracing, which might help with performance on lower-end hardware.

Most of these issues can be addressed with future patches, but it's just sad to see the launch state of many AAA games running Unreal Engine 5. Regardless, for those who have high-end hardware, they can utilize upscaling and frame-gen for a great time in Borderlands 4. I have been enjoying the game so far despite its performance drawbacks. It sucks for those with mid or low-end hardware, as the series has a huge fanbase, but only high-end PC owners can play the game decently.

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