Borderlands 4 came out, only for it to be hither-and-yonder beyond perfunctorily operable on anything but a $2000+ GPU. That’s the impression NikTek-viral personality-gave-and with some… off-base advice for those PC players struggling with performance.
The tweet implied: Consequently, all Borderlands 4 players buying for the PC, buy the RTX 5090 with a $2k price tag; open DLSS in performance mode and frame generation, and watch the fps go weighted from 90 to 160. Cool cool cool. Like, no big deal just recommending somebody spends more on a GPU than some have on their entire gaming setup.
The replies? We are talking whole-mood affairs here. Players are just not having it. One person said, “Nobody’s willing to spend $2000 for a GPU to run a game they paid $80 for,” which is… duh? The math don’t math. Why would you spend 25 times the price of the game just to make it playable? Crazy developer expectations.
Are they real frames, then? There are a lot of debates about. Someone termed them “fake frames,” thus leading into an entire thing with frame-generation tech- it creates artificial frames between real ones to make things look smoother-but to some degree, they can feel a little weird. Okay, maybe “some degree” is an understatement for most FPS games where input lag matters. So, Borderlands is a looter shooter, meaning precise aiming matters, right? Just throwing that out there.
And then we’ll have cases of people saying that cheaper cards deliver good performance. Somebody said with max settings on a 4060, he was getting around 70-100fps, all good. Another questioned for proof passed by the skeptic; the skeptic then challenged him to a live stream on Discord later. This just makes the whole thing messy.
This discussion of optimization is real, though. Several blamed Unreal Engine 5 upfront with one person standing: “Unreal Engine 5 is the problem. We all know it.” Then another went on: “Tim Sweeney claims himself it is most the fault of the developers whenever UE5 games are bad, so maybe it isn’t all the engine. It may be Gearbox’s implementation?”
Speaking of Gearbox being dragged, lots of that is going on, too. “I don’t expect anything from Gearbox except bullshit,” says one person. Another one bites in: “It’s right to hate on Borderlands since the 3rd game lol,” so apparently, this isn’t new behavior for them. Seems like this franchise has been having performance issues for a while now.
The other “just play the classics” type advice coming up: “Another small tip if you can’t run Borderlands 4 there is Borderlands 2 for you.” I honestly can’t say that one is wrong. Sometimes it just works older games, and honestly, Borderlands 2 is just amazing: maybe just sneak and play instead of buying rent on that graphics card for two months?
The entire thread is in chaos-specs are argued about, defending multi-billion-dollar corporations for free, and generally frustrated that a AAA game in 2024 requires hardware only 1% people can afford. An RTX 5090 doesn’t even exist yet? The better phrase for this advice is “ill-fitting.”
“Let them eat cake”-level vibes, only for gamers. Oh, you can’t run our poorly optimized game? Just buy the most expensive hardware on the market that hasn’t even been released yet. Problem solved! Meanwhile, some folks are out here struggling on 4060s and 3080s just to hit consistent frames.
Then about the boost from 90fps to 160fps: If it’s true, who would really notice the difference between 90 and 160 fps? Unless you are some elite professional esports player, that’s just diminishing returns. Most can’t tell the difference over the 100fps mark anyway. Is it really spending $2000 for bragging rights then?
The whole thing seems so much cut up from the reality of how real gamers actually play games. Most people don’t have infinite budgets for hardware. They save up for a cheap PC and expect a game to be optimized to run on that hardware basis, not require the far latest and greatest to even just function properly.
And the fact that this is coming from someone with “Official” in their handle just makes it all that much worse. So this ain’t just some random dude. This is purportedly someone with inside knowledge? Well, looking at the replies, the entire direction is people calling them out for just farming engagement, so who knows anymore.
One thing is for sure: Borderlands 4 is messily optimized on PC, given the fact that such conversations are ever taking place. When the solution to bad performance is “buy better hardware” instead of “the developers should fix their game” – that’s a problem. Games should be optimized for the hardware people actually have, and not the hardware existing in some theoretical future.
Anyway, why even bother with Borderlands 4 on PC if you’re trying these days? Better not. Or lower the settings. Or play something else till they sort it. Spending 2,000 on a GPU to fix some very poor game optimization is just beyond reason. Consider your wallet worthy of better care.
The entire conversation on the quality of PC ports has been warming for years now, and this is just another incident of frustrated gamers constantly forced to upgrade their hardware due to developers’ unwillingness to optimize games accordingly. That’s not a sustainable model, and eventually, something has to give. Either games get better optimized, or people refuse to buy them. Let’s see what comes first.
