Borderlands 4 was genuinely demanding and inconsistent on PC at launch, even on an RTX 5090. Independent testing found the flagship GPU dropping into the 40-fps range in demanding sections, while traversal stutter, shader compilation, CPU limitations and crashes made the experience feel worse than average frame rates suggested.
The 2.7 GB day-one patch improved stability and fixed several launch problems, but it did not completely solve performance. Subsequent updates delivered the more substantial recovery. Gearbox reported 9% to 20% gains on minimum- and recommended-spec systems in its December 2025 optimization update, while its April 2026 Version 1.6 notes still described optimization as ongoing.
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The short version
- Was Borderlands 4 badly optimized at launch? Yes. Testing on both minimum-spec and RTX 5090-class systems supports that conclusion.
- Did the day-one patch fix it? It improved stability and addressed crashes and launch issues, but did not eliminate traversal stutter or guarantee smooth high-refresh-rate performance.
- Is the PC version still exactly as bad? No. Several later updates materially improved performance and frame pacing, although results remain highly dependent on the scene, CPU, resolution, settings, driver and game version.
- Should you buy an RTX 5090 for this game? No. A faster GPU cannot solve CPU bottlenecks, shader compilation, streaming delays or poor frame pacing.
The fairest description in 2026 is “demanding and improved,” not “fixed” and not “unplayable.”
How bad was the RTX 5090 result?
Borderlands 4 launched on PC on September 11, 2025, alongside a reported 2.7 GB day-one patch. Early testing found unusually poor performance even with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 5090 system. TechSpot’s testing found the flagship card struggling around the 60-fps mark in demanding conditions, with drops into the 40s in heavier areas.
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- BE A BADASS: Become an unstoppable force of battle, blasting through enemies with an all-new arsenal of outrageous weaponry. Move across the Borderlands like never before—double jumping, gliding, dodging, grappling, and more—dealing death from every direction. Explode each encounter with devastating Action Skills that unleash your Vault Hunter's unique abilities. Craft your perfect build with branching skill trees and a deep, rewarding loot chase full of wild weapons and powerful gear.
- FIGHT SOLO OR CO-OP: Wreaking havoc across Kairos is awesome alone and even better with friends in 2-player splitscreen or up to 4-player online co-op.** Borderlands 4 is designed for co-op from the ground up; whether you're hunting for loot, tackling missions, or wandering freely, level scaling and individual difficulty keeps the party together and having fun.
- LESS BORDERS, MORE LANDS: Freely explore a vast and dangerous world rife with warring factions. Hop on your hover bike and ride through lush fields, towering peaks, and deadly deserts full of fearsome enemies, dynamic events, and engaging quests with unforgettable characters. Unite the people of Kairos and ignite a revolution, tackling this adventure however you see fit in a seamless Borderlands experience.
Those figures should not be treated as a universal RTX 5090 result. Resolution, preset, upscaling, frame generation, driver and build all matter. They do, however, disprove the idea that launch performance problems were simply caused by insufficient graphics horsepower.
PC Gamer’s testing of both a minimum-spec PC and a top-end RTX 5090 machine also showed problems across the hardware range, although the severity naturally varied. The important distinction is between a benchmark average and the experience of playing:
- Average FPS can look acceptable while frame times spike.
- Traversal can produce stutter as the open world streams assets and compiles shaders.
- Combat can cause sharp drops when effects, AI, physics and volumetrics overlap.
- GPU-limited scenes respond to lower resolution, lighting and effects settings.
- CPU-limited scenes may show low GPU utilization and remain slow after reducing image quality.
Frame generation adds another complication. It can raise the displayed frame rate, but generated frames do not replace the underlying rendering work. If the base frame rate is unstable, frame generation cannot remove the game’s CPU, streaming or traversal bottlenecks—and may make latency or frame pacing concerns more noticeable.
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The issue was not one setting or one hardware component. Several expensive systems were active at the same time:
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- Pre-purchase now. Playable on 2025-09-12. Borderlands 4 Super Deluxe Edition includes: Full base game, the Pre-Order Bonus: Gilded Glory Pack*, the Firehawk's Fury Weapon Skin, the Bounty Pack Bundle**, the Ornate Order Pack, and the Vault Hunter Pack***.
- BE A BADASS: Become an unstoppable force of battle, blasting through enemies with an all-new arsenal of outrageous weaponry. Move across the Borderlands like never before—double jumping, gliding, dodging, grappling, and more—dealing death from every direction. Explode each encounter with devastating Action Skills that unleash your Vault Hunter's unique abilities. Craft your perfect build with branching skill trees and a deep, rewarding loot chase full of wild weapons and powerful gear.
- FIGHT SOLO OR CO-OP: Wreaking havoc across Kairos is awesome alone and even better with friends in 2-player splitscreen or up to 4-player online co-op.** Borderlands 4 is designed for co-op from the ground up; whether you're hunting for loot, tackling missions, or wandering freely, level scaling and individual difficulty keeps the party together and having fun.
- LESS BORDERS, MORE LANDS: Freely explore a vast and dangerous world rife with warring factions. Hop on your hover bike and ride through lush fields, towering peaks, and deadly deserts full of fearsome enemies, dynamic events, and engaging quests with unforgettable characters. Unite the people of Kairos and ignite a revolution, tackling this adventure however you see fit in a seamless Borderlands experience.
- Unreal Engine 5 lighting: Lumen adds substantial cost to dynamic global illumination and reflections.
- Large open-world areas: Streaming geometry, textures and other assets can create spikes during movement.
- Foliage, water and volumetrics: Vegetation, clouds, fog, reflections and effects can become especially expensive in outdoor areas.
- CPU-side simulation: World activity, NPC spawning, physics, UI work and draw-call submission can limit performance before the GPU reaches full utilization.
- Shader and PSO compilation: New effects and materials may stutter while the game prepares shaders and pipeline state objects.
- VRAM and asset management: Poor allocation or streaming behavior can contribute to hitching, crashes or inconsistent frame times.
Gearbox’s later optimization work is revealing. Its December 11, 2025 major update specifically addressed Lumen, foliage, water, reflections, shader and PSO compilation, UI overhead, physics, Niagara effects, NPC spawning, CPU execution, VRAM organization and out-of-memory crashes. That list indicates an engine and workload problem rather than a simple shortage of GPU power.
What did the day-one patch actually fix?
The launch patch helped, but its role is easy to overstate. Reports from Tom’s Hardware and other coverage describe improvements to stability, crashes, errors and several launch-related technical problems.
That was valuable for a game arriving with severe early issues. It did not mean every PC would suddenly hold 60 fps, nor did it remove all traversal stutter, shader hitches or CPU-limited drops. The day-one patch was a launch-quality intervention—not the complete optimization overhaul that arrived through later updates.
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| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| September 11, 2025 | PC launch with a reported 2.7 GB day-one patch addressing launch stability and technical issues. |
| September 18, 2025 | Update focused on PC stability, crashes and progression-related problems. |
| September 25, 2025 | Further stability and performance improvements alongside broader fixes. |
| December 11, 2025 | Major optimization update. Gearbox reported measured frame-rate gains of 9% to 20% on minimum- and recommended-spec PCs and made extensive rendering, CPU, memory and shader changes. |
| March 26, 2026 | The Story Pack 1 update noted that NVIDIA driver 590.xx or newer avoids clearing the game’s GPU driver shader cache after game updates. |
| April 30, 2026 | Version 1.6 continued stability and optimization work. |
Gearbox’s 9%–20% figure is an official internal measurement, not a universal independently reproduced result. Performance can also regress for particular systems or settings after an update. For a meaningful comparison, record the game build, driver, CPU, GPU, resolution, upscaler, frame-generation mode and preset.
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![Borderlands 4 Deluxe - PC Steam [Online Game Code]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51E96mSrZaL._SL160_.jpg)
- Pre-purchase now. Playable on 2025-09-12. Borderlands 4 Deluxe Edition includes: Full base game, the Pre-Order Bonus: Gilded Glory Pack*, the Firehawk's Fury Weapon Skin, and the Bounty Pack Bundle**
- BE A BADASS: Become an unstoppable force of battle, blasting through enemies with an all-new arsenal of outrageous weaponry. Move across the Borderlands like never before—double jumping, gliding, dodging, grappling, and more—dealing death from every direction. Explode each encounter with devastating Action Skills that unleash your Vault Hunter's unique abilities. Craft your perfect build with branching skill trees and a deep, rewarding loot chase full of wild weapons and powerful gear.
- FIGHT SOLO OR CO-OP: Wreaking havoc across Kairos is awesome alone and even better with friends in 2-player splitscreen or up to 4-player online co-op.** Borderlands 4 is designed for co-op from the ground up; whether you're hunting for loot, tackling missions, or wandering freely, level scaling and individual difficulty keeps the party together and having fun.
- LESS BORDERS, MORE LANDS: Freely explore a vast and dangerous world rife with warring factions. Hop on your hover bike and ride through lush fields, towering peaks, and deadly deserts full of fearsome enemies, dynamic events, and engaging quests with unforgettable characters. Unite the people of Kairos and ignite a revolution, tackling this adventure however you see fit in a seamless Borderlands experience.
Gearbox’s official performance targets
Gearbox’s PC troubleshooting and optimization guide describes these targets:
| Target | Resolution and frame rate | Preset |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum | 1080p at 30 fps | Low |
| Recommended | 1440p at 60 fps | Medium |
These are targets, not guarantees. “Recommended” does not mean native 4K at maximum settings. The Steam listing currently identifies the PC version and its minimum hardware requirements, but store specifications and live review figures can change, so check the current Steam page before buying or comparing systems.
Settings to try first
There is no verified universal best-settings profile for every PC. Start with the following priorities and judge changes using the same demanding area rather than a short run through an easy corridor.
Lower these before texture quality
- Lumen or global lighting quality. This is often a larger performance lever than materials or textures.
- Volumetric clouds and fog. These can be expensive in outdoor areas and during effects-heavy combat.
- Shadows. Lower them or use the available shadow-off option if you need more consistent frame times.
- Foliage and vegetation. Outdoor scenes can benefit significantly from reduced density or quality.
- Reflections and water. These matter most in areas where reflective surfaces are prominent.
- Effects quality. Reduce it if combat causes the largest drops.
The December update added or exposed options to disable shadows, volumetric clouds and fog, reinforcing that these are meaningful tuning points. If VRAM is sufficient, preserve texture quality where possible: lowering textures often harms image quality more than reducing lighting or volumetric effects.
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- Co-op Design - Borderlands is built from the ground up to be an exciting, intuitive cooperative experience for up to four players simultaneously that rewards players who work together and invest in co-op skills. Split screen is also supported.
- FPS Gameplay - In this role-playing shooter, choose one of several distinct characters, each with their own individual skill sets. As your character grows throughout this fast-paced FPS, you choose and customize your abilities to suit your style of play.
- Art Style - The game's distinctive art style combines traditional rendering techniques with hand-drawn textures to paint a bold and eye-catching spin on the FPS genre.
- Vehicular Combat - Jump behind the wheel and engage in high-speed vehicle-to-vehicle combat, complete with spectacular explosions and road-killed Skags.
Use upscaling deliberately
DLSS or FSR may be necessary at 1440p and especially 4K. Begin with a quality-oriented mode, then move toward balanced or performance modes only if the base render rate remains too low. At 4K, aggressive upscaling helped make high-refresh-rate play more achievable on an RTX 5090 in TechSpot’s testing, but midrange GPUs could still struggle at 1440p even with balanced upscaling.
For diagnosis, turn frame generation off. First establish a stable base frame rate and acceptable frame times; then enable frame generation and evaluate latency and smoothness separately.
Useful starting profiles
- 1080p or 1440p balanced: Medium settings, reduced Lumen, volumetrics and shadows, quality upscaling, textures kept as high as VRAM allows.
- 4K quality: Quality upscaling, reduced lighting and volumetric settings, with frame generation optional after base performance is stable.
- 4K high refresh: Expect compromises. Use stronger upscaling and lower the most expensive lighting, shadow, foliage and effects settings.
- Crash or stutter diagnosis: Medium or Low preset, frame generation disabled, overlays disabled, current driver, and a completed shader-compilation period.
What to do before blaming your hardware
- Install the latest Borderlands 4 update.
- Update your GPU driver and note its version.
- Install the game on an SSD. An SSD may improve loading and streaming behavior, although it will not guarantee higher average FPS.
- Disable overlays temporarily. Test Steam, Epic, Discord, recording and GPU utility overlays if you are seeing crashes or hitching.
- Allow shader compilation to finish. After changing major graphics settings, play for at least 15 minutes before judging the result, as Gearbox advises.
- Verify the game files through Steam or Epic if assets appear corrupted or updates behave strangely.
- Test with frame generation disabled when investigating crashes, latency or unstable frame times.
- Restart the game after installing updates, changing drivers or completing major graphics changes.
Repeated stutter after updates can also relate to shader-cache rebuilding. For NVIDIA users, Gearbox says driver version 590.xx or newer prevents the game’s GPU driver shader cache from being cleared after a new game version.
Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsHow to identify the bottleneck
- GPU usage near 95%–100%: Lower resolution, upscaling mode, Lumen, shadows, volumetrics, foliage or effects.
- Low GPU usage with poor FPS: Suspect a CPU thread limit, streaming, shader compilation or engine overhead rather than immediately buying a faster GPU.
- Short hitches during movement: Compare traversal with stationary combat. Streaming and shader compilation may be involved.
- High average FPS but an unpleasant feel: Examine frame times or 1% lows. Frame pacing can matter more than the headline average.
- Crashes after enabling frame generation: Revert it temporarily, verify files, update drivers and retest with a simpler preset.
Different areas of Kairos can behave very differently. A single benchmark route or opening sequence cannot represent every combat encounter, open-world zone or later patch.
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Should you upgrade your PC?
If you already own an RTX 5090
Optimize first. Use upscaling, reduce Lumen and volumetrics, test shadows and foliage, confirm shader-cache behavior, and check whether your CPU is limiting performance. Do not assume native 4K at maximum settings will be smooth in every scene.
If you own an RTX 4080-, 4090- or 5080-class GPU
Target 1440p or 4K with upscaling and tune lighting-heavy settings. A faster card may help in GPU-limited scenes, but it cannot guarantee smooth traversal if the limiting factor is CPU work or streaming.
If your PC is close to minimum specification
Target Gearbox’s stated 1080p/30 Low profile rather than high-refresh play. Close background applications, use an SSD and expect that some demanding areas may still require additional compromises.
If you are considering a new GPU solely for Borderlands 4
Wait for benchmarks using the current game build and driver, and do not treat an upgrade as a guaranteed fix. The game’s own optimization history shows why GPU horsepower alone is not the whole answer.
Bottom line
The RTX 5090 struggled in some Borderlands 4 launch scenarios because the game combined expensive UE5 rendering with open-world streaming, shader compilation, CPU-side workloads and inconsistent frame pacing. The 2.7 GB day-one patch fixed plenty of crashes and stability problems, but it did not finish the optimization job.
Later patches improved the situation substantially, including Gearbox’s claimed 9%–20% gains on lower-spec targets and changes to rendering, shaders, CPU execution and memory management. As of Version 1.6 on April 30, 2026, the game is better supported than it was at launch, but performance remains scene- and system-dependent. Tune the software before buying hardware.
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