Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox knows the looter shooter launched in September with a swarm of PC issues attached to it, but it's already made some major performance changes – and it's prepared to make even more.
"A lot of our optimization work for PC players has centered on providing meaningful improvements in frame rate without noticeable sacrifices to the game, including visual fidelity, that are fundamental to the artistic intent of Gearbox's developers," Gearbox explains in a PC performance update post on its website released alongside a DevCast video on the same topic, which you can watch below.
Gearbox continues in its update, "Over the past several months, these optimizations have improved average FPS by approximately 20% across the board, including on our minimum and recommended specifications. But this is just the start." The developer acknowledges "we have more to do," but, "We're in it for the long haul!"
Managing producer Eli Luna notes in Gearbox's DevCast that Borderlands 4 is "our first game on Unreal 5 technology" – a notoriously buggy engine – so "there were a lot of things that we needed to look at as part of this launch on how we made our content and how we can make it more efficient."
According to Gearbox's post, compared to performance at launch, the next Borderlands 4 patch arriving March 26 with new DLC Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned created an approximately "20% gain in average frame rates across different PC specs," "nearly halved the crash rate, from 0.63% of all sessions to 0.38%," and "made backend code improvements to greatly improve UI efficiency."
But even with all those changes piling up over the last few months, Luna reiterates on video, "We still have a lot of work to do, and we're not stopping anytime soon."
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