NVIDIA tweeted to hype Borderlands 4: RTX On for Rise Against Kairos and some ultimate Vault Hunter-y good stuff. And gamers? Well, they are HISTORY. The responses are full of those performance complaints. It is just downright crazy.
Straight away, Dragoneye shoots back, “Its WILD Nvidia is advertising this game when it struggles even on a 5090.” Big yikes there. So, if the almost-top-tier card, conceptually, and not even out yet cannot handle it, what does that say about the rest of us with, you know, actual current-gen hardware? Major red flags.
The Yamabushi then chimes, “At a raging 20 FPS!!!” Damn. Twenty. Frames. Per. Second. That is not a next-gen experience; that is a slideshow. Maybe an extremely pretty, ray-traced slideshow, but still. You can’t be the ultimate Vault Hunter if you’re moving in stop motion.
FoxPurple has asked the question everyone is thinking: “@NVIDIAGeForce How is it 10/10 with such a bad performance?” Which is fair. How would you award a perfect score to something that apparently runs so poorly? It just makes the whole promotion sound a bit disingenuous, as if they’re emphasizing the tech demo aspect over the real, play-within-a-minute-time experience.
Things get even messier on the highly technical level. Soundsarcasm puts down a long thread asking Grok to discuss the cons of DLSS. Being an AI, it’s very useful for dropping “knowledge bombs” about some user reports from different forum and YouTube examples describing situations where DLSS introduced “artifacts, ghosting or blurriness.” They continue with a single, very concrete example- Cyberpunk 2077, where tests showed it probably reduces slight detail at the benefit of higher framerates.
Ultimately, you have to choose your poison. It’s never a free lunch. DLSS is the AI-fueled magic that upscales a lower-resolution image to run faster, but sometimes it all falls apart. You might get to see all the pretty lighting, but the image might not be as crisp as true native rendering. It is a trade-off: fidelity or framerate, and framerate is usually king for a fast-paced looter-shooter like Borderlands.
But Grok goes even further, stating casually that NVIDIA is under investigation by the US DOJ, France, and China for “anti-competitive acts like customer lock-in and monopoly violations.” Whoa. That escalated really fast…Wei from “my game is stuttering” to “this corporation might be a monopoly.” They suggest that real competition among AMD and Intel could actually benefit us as consumers in terms of pricing and innovation. So, in a way, all the push for their proprietary tech looks to be just a part of something higher and somewhat shady.
It is much to unpack. On one side, there is NVIDIA hyping this gorgeously-looking new Borderlands game full blast with their cutting-edge tech turned on. On the other side, the players are reporting that the outright horrendous performance is even questioning the tech’s integrity and the company behind it. The whole thing creates this weird disconnect between marketing hype and grounded reality.
This is a real bummer for gamers who are just looking forward to shooting some skags and collecting a billion guns. You want the game to look nice, sure-but it has to run fine. Smooth gameplay is everything; all the ray tracing in the world is worthless if the game is chugging along like it’s running on a potato.
So, it’s a really tough spot for Gearbox Software. Since they’re the ones developing the title, it’s a really tough spot in that the biggest visual showcase they have for this game has been sullied because of how bad the performance is, courtesy of one particular partner technology. That must be hard to take. You spend years crafting this thing, and the very first thing that gets said about it is, well it’s not running well with the fancy graphics switched on.
What was I saying? Oh right. So the overall vibe from the community is super-skeptical. It’s not just “Oh, this is poorly optimized.” It’s an entire ecosystem of conversations branching into the trade-offs of upscaling tech, the value of native performance, even on to the business practices of a tech giant. All from one tweet trying to sell us on pretty lights.
In the end, all this increases the wariness of the people. It gives you pause, questioning if that “RTX On” button is really worthwhile being ticked. Maybe for a screenshot but for actually playing the game? Probably not. Here’s hoping that Gearbox and NVIDIA manage to sort these things out before launch as nobody in their right mind wants to take on a boss named Kairos at 20 frames a second. Nightmare fuel. The ultimate Vault Hunter deserves a smooth ride, especially on PlayStation or Xbox.
