If you thought that the technical issues with Borderlands 4 were relegated to fiddling around with settings and cache sizes on PC, you’d be wrong. The game also has significant issues on console, a place where players are unable to try many workarounds to fix things with hardware and most settings set in stone.
It has taken a Digital Foundry deep dive to confirm what many console players have experienced. Over time, performance of the game on console declines and declines until it reaches a point where there’s only on fix. Turn it on and off again, the solution to so many other tech problems. But here, you’ll have to do it constantly.
This is across all consoles the game is available on, PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox Series S and X. Though obviously PS5 Pro has some advantages with Series S has some disadvantages. But overall, these are big issues across the board.
The declines can start happening as soon as 30 minutes into a play session, and even by an hour, can drop down to 35 fps in 720p at times. It’s not always that bad, and not always that quickly, as it can depend on the part of the map and what’s happening during gameplay, but the end result is the same, downgraded performance over time.
The solution is to quit the game and restart your save. Digital Foundry shows that it’s a “night and day” difference, in some instances almost doubling frame rate by simply doing this. Of course, Borderlands 4 being a game that encourages long play sessions, that’s very annoying to be asked to do that after 30 minutes or a few hours.
This is not unknown to Gearbox. Verbose CEO Randy Pitchford has already recommended on Twitter that players should do this fix, restart the game, in order to alleviate performance issues. But yes, he did confirm that of course Gearbox is working on a patch to plug these leaks, and hopefully they will not be around much longer.
Shutting down and restarting is not really the fix for PC, which can involve fiddling DLSS and fog settings, among others, or in the case of the one thing that really helped me, changing NVIDIA shader cache size to 100 GB, which legitimately fixed almost all my problems (albeit that’s a very bootleg fix I have never had to do for any other game).
Borderlands 4 is an awesome game and it is too bad it is making a poor first impression for many with these enormous performance problems. On console, keep restarting I guess, a bad solution for a bad problem until something else comes along.
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