Gearbox and Randy Pitchford aim a fire hose at the Borderlands 4 PC port, share "optimization guide" and a tip to "boost your performance" which is, big surprise, enabling DLSS performance with frame gen

Borderlands 4 is finally upon us, and while the verdict on the game as a whole remains out among fans, there's one glaring controversy: PC performance. Worries about how the game would run were strong ahead of launch, and are now the strongest point of criticism after release. Both Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford and the studio more broadly have provided some tips about improving performance with, let's just say, varying degrees of helpfulness.

"If you’re playing Borderlands 4 on PC and want to boost your performance," Pitchford says on Twitter, "@MoxsyOG shared this settings tip where he was able to jump from 90fps to 160fps! I hear he’ll be posting the full video soon and you can watch him play on Twitch at https://m.twitch.tv/moxsy"

That's a lovely shout-out from a studio head to a content creator, but there's a problem: "this settings tip" is simply turning on DLSS and frame generation. Those are a pair of AI-adjacent techniques that do tend to substantially boost frame rates, but frame gen only boosts perceived performance, and DLSS – or similar types of upscaling – is only available on particular types of GPUs. People are already regularly upset when games only perform well with frame gen, so I'm not sure this will have the desired effect.

It's not exactly what the community wants to hear but, admittedly, the "Nvidia Optimization guide" Gearbox has shared on Steam might be more helpful if you want to maximize your performance. These charts offer a series of settings recommendations for running the game across various frame rate and resolution targets on different GPUs – assuming, of course, you're running Nvidia hardware.

But then, these charts also suggest that you might need to be content with 30 FPS at 1080p on low settings with an RTX 2070, and that's with DLSS upscaling turned on. This, in short, is not the sort of performance PC gamers have grown accustomed to, and if you want to read a lot of angry players joining your performance commiserations, well, there's a comments section for that.

If you're looking for some gameplay-related Borderlands 4 tips, you know where to click.