Introduction

Borderlands 4 is a first-person looter-shooter RPG developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games. This next chapter in the legendary game series introduces new planets, enemy factions, and an expanded arsenal of procedurally generated weapons. Players can tackle the story alone or in co-op, with a mix of fast-paced combat, character progression, and loot-driven exploration that continues the core formula the series is known for.



Released six years after Borderlands 3 in 2019, this entry is built on Unreal Engine 5, bringing technical improvements while maintaining the game's typical cel-shaded art direction. With UE5 Lumen real-time global illumination, the game delivers dynamic lighting and reflections across various environments, even without hardware ray tracing support. Borderlands 4 supports NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS for upscaling. Frame Generation is available for all three GPU vendors, too.

This review will evaluate the performance of Borderlands 4 across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the "Badass" settings profile with motion blur disabled, the upscaling was set to "TSR full resolution." The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The first settings screen has mostly monitor related options
• Window mode options are "windowed," "fullscreen" and "borderless"
• You may enable an FPS counter in-game, optionally with additional detail showing GPU frametime and ping latency
• The FPS cap can be set to either 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 FPS
• V-Sync can be disabled completely
• The field of view range goes from 70 to 110 degrees, with the default at 90. I found 90 a bit too narrow and prefer 100

• The second screen called "Advanced" deal with more hardware related settings
• The graphics presets available are "Low," "Medium," "High," "Very High" and "Badass"
• Anti-Aliasing can be disabled when you select upscaler "Disabled"—it looks terrible
• Upscaling methods available are: "Disabled," "DLSS," "FSR," "TSR" and "XeSS"
• "Spatial Upscaling Quality" can only be enabled when FSR is used as upscaler, it offers a bit of additional performance at the loss of quality
• "Scene Capture Quality" controls how the in-game map and menus look like
• Frame generation can be enabled only when the appropriate GPU is installed. For NVIDIA this is expected, but AMD FSR and Intel XeSS works on all GPUs—not in Borderlands 4. I guess the developers weren't aware of that fact
• In addition to that, there's an excellent amount of additional options to fine-tune the performance
• You can disable motion blur completely