It’s been a rough first day at the office for Borderlands 4, which has launched amid spyware denials and widespread user reports of dodgy PC performance. That being crashing, stuttering, the usual Unreal Engine 5 trouble at the mill. Framerate-related grumbling in particular has prompted a Steam post from Gearbox, presenting a setting-by-setting guide to optimisation on GeForce graphics cards that their pals at Nvidia put together.

First off, oi, that’s my job. Second, I say "prompted", but the sheer number of GPUs it covers – separately for 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions – has produced settings tables so rich in cells that it’s far more likely a sweating intern has spent the entire past week cranking these out. No disrespect, obviously. Solidarity to benchmarkers. But, are these guides reliable?

Let’s start by taking a my god, look at the size of it.

Image credit: 2K

Maybe the text version further down the post is more easily readable?

Image credit: 2K

Ah. JPG it is then, where we can see that even at 1080p, Borderlands 4 thinks you should run it with both DLSS upscaling and frame generation. I booted up the RPS Test Rig with an 8GB RTX 4060 Ti, one of the included cards, and settled down in one of the more demanding open world areas for a spot of corroboration.

And yes, DLSS – or the GPU-supported upscaler of your choosing – is clearly intended as standard procedure. With frame gen disabled and Nvidia’s suggested settings in place, I was averaging 99fps, but switching off Quality-level DLSS and running at native 1080p saw that stoop to 62fps.

Frame gen itself, meanwhile, is just weird. It did get my average framerate up to 148fps (visually, anyway – only 90 to 95 of those were 'real' frames) but motion didn’t appear any smoother. In fact, it gained a harsher, grittier quality that didn’t look dissimilar to a lower framerate. I’ve seen this happen with less advanced upscalers like the original FSR 3.0, but never with the new and improved DLSS 4.

Otherwise, Gearbox/Nvidia’s settings guide for the RTX 4060 Ti is decent, if a little excessive. I’m not sure it needs such deep cuts to volumetric clouds and the main shadow quality options, both of which produced negligible differences between their highest and lowest settings in my testing. Foliage density, volumetric fog, and directional shadows all have slightly bigger framerate impacts, but I only lost 3-5fps apiece by toggling them to Very High. Which, by the by, is worth trying for foliage, given how bare the game looks without its veggies.

Image credit: 2K

Still, the guide does correctly identify these as leveraging some level of performance tax, and I’d have to agree with it keeping lighting quality on Low. This is one of the heaviest settings of the bunch, with my RTX 4060 Ti falling from 99fps to 74fps after changing this single setting up to Very High, with surprisingly little gain in terms of visual niceness. Frame gen remains a no-no, but fair dos, you would be getting a more fined-tuned Borderlands 4 with these than any of the presets.

Unfortunately, a good showing for Gearbox’s big Excel project ultimately doesn’t truly address its performance problems. I haven’t had any crashes yet but stuttering is, indeed, a common occurrence, especially during big fights where multiple baddies are onscreen and some manner of elemental particle effect tornado is blowing through them. Which, this being a Borderlands game, is most fights. Although higher framerates can help mask the effect, it doesn’t seem that you can completely stutter-proof your PC, even with pre-tailored settings recommendations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it doesn’t pay to try skirting under the system requirements. I had a cheeky go on my RTX 4050 laptop, the 8GB system RAM and 6GB VRAM of which come under the official minimums, and even DLSS wasn’t enough to stay above 30fps in the open world. With, naturally, plenty of big stutters along the way.

Whether you’re playing Borderlands 4 or not, we’re all uncomfortably familiar with the problem at this point. It’s one that’s frayed the edges of games, unusual Unreal Engine 5 ones, from recent releases Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and Dune: Awakening back to the likes of Remnant II and beyond. We also know by now, as Gearbox and 2K should, that it’s not something that can be fixed on our end by changing a few settings.