Borderlands 4 – Optimized PC Settings Guide

Oh boy. Here we go again. Though Gearbox and Randy Pitchford definitely hinted as much, we simply had no idea just how crummy Borderlands 4's PC performance would be in the end, as of day one. That's right, folks: Borderlands 4 runs like it's had both of its legs tied together, and its feet glued to the floor. Even if you're well above its minimum system requirements, and you already have the day one patch installed, it's still pretty darn bad.

Thankfully, our expertise in game tuning and PC optimization means we've got a fair few tricks up our sleeves to make Borderlands 4 run better across the board. The flip side of that is that, as of September 12, this means you'll need to drop settings quite a lot to make Borderlands 4 playable on mid-range PCs, let alone attempting to have it run on something like the Steam Deck. That's a no-go right off the bat, though we will test our theory soon enough.

Down below, we've assembled a list of must-do tweaks and tunes to make Borderlands 4 run as smoothly as possible. With a bit of luck, these will tide us all over until Gearbox Software optimizes the game and improves its overall performance envelope. Let's get to it!

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Optimized PC Graphics Settings for Borderlands 4

Borderlands 4 is easily the worst-performing PC game of 2025 (so far). Well, okay, it's the second-worst right after Monster Hunter Wilds, which also doesn't look nearly as good as Borderlands 4 does. Borderlands 4 is also a rather excellent game underneath its crummy performance envelope, so that's good news in the long run.

In the short term, though, here's a shortlist of PC graphics settings we recommend to have Borderlands 4 run as well as humanly possible, on as wide of a range of hardware as possible. Note that our aim was to get a reasonably solid 60 FPS without excessive image quality drop: it's all about that balance.

We understand that enabling Motion Blur might be against some players' personal religion, but it's a well implemented feature in this game that massively improves the baseline stuttering and potential performance drops. On top of that, we've found that virtually all volumetric lighting and rendering settings have a huge effect on Borderlands 4's performance - much as was the case with Borderlands 3 - and so we recommend leaving the settings off or low enough not to hobble your performance. It's not great, honestly, but these tweaks should tide you over until Gearbox can fix things up.

What about traversal stutter and the Stutter-Struggle at large?

So, good news on this front is that Borderlands 4 doesn't seem to have an excessive amount of stuttering. Certainly, the game will stutter if you crank things up too high, and there is some amount of traversal stutter present, but it's not nearly as big of an issue as it was in, say, the Oblivion Remake. Instead, it's more of a minor concern that pales in comparison to the game's broader performance problems.

Do note that Borderlands 4 has not one but two separate shader compilation steps: one of them takes place at the initial load-up, while the other appears to fill out the gaps during the gameplay loading screen. It's a tad egregious, yes, but it's also fairly comprehensive, and probably the reason why we're not seeing massive stuttering left and right. That's Unreal Engine 5 for ya, folks.

Using Frame Generation in Borderlands 4

Yep, do it. Now that you've hopefully reached a rock-solid 60 FPS in Borderlands 4 before turning on Frame Gen (this is crucial, as we explain in a separate article discussing the tech), we simply have to recommend using either the on-board Frame Gen solution or third-party Lossless Scaling to reach higher performance tiers in Borderlands 4. With a baseline of 60 FPS, you should be able to get up to 120 FPS without any stutters and/or extreme artifacting, and it makes the game's lootey-shootey gameplay loop much, much enjoyable in the end.

The fact of the matter is that Borderlands 4 in its current state seems eager not to run well no matter what you do, but tech such as Frame Gen side-steps the game's own performance to deliver the next best thing. It's not ideal, no, and you are getting some amount of added input latency, but we believe the effect is well worth it.

Are Improvements Coming?

In the end, Borderlands 4 is a phenomenal looter-shooter beset by some truly egregious performance problems. It's a fixable problem we believe, and we'll keep this article up-to-date with the latest tweaks, mods, and improvements as they drop in. In the interim, use the tricks we've provided, see if Frame Gen features can't tide you over, and have fun looting and shooting! We know we will...

Save up to 32% on Borderlands 4 using code ‘5OFF‘

Here we go, again.