Borderlands 4 is coming out this weekend, and initial tests have confirmed that the game is extremely demanding on hardware. The project runs on Unreal Engine 5, and even for a stable 60 fps on maximum settings, modern technologies will have to be enabled.
According to NVIDIA, a GeForce RTX 3080 is the minimum required for comfortable gaming. In a recent DLSS 4 report, the company showcased benchmarks that utilize both Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation. Without them, even the most powerful video cards show weak results. The RTX 5090, the market leader, delivers only about 50 fps in "pure" 4K, while with DLSS 4, the frame rate jumps to 256 fps. The RTX 5080 demonstrates 166 fps, which is 5.5 times higher than native 4K.
At 1440p resolution, the game requires not only powerful video cards (the tests involved RTX 5070 Ti, 5080, and 5090) but also at least 16 GB of video memory. The tests were conducted on a system with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 64 GB of RAM.
When reducing the resolution to 1080p, all RTX 50 series video cards deliver more than 160 fps with DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation enabled. However, if these technologies are disabled, the performance drops sharply. The RTX 5070, for example, shows only 50–60 fps without DLSS, which confirms that playing with maximum settings in Borderlands 4 will not be possible without upscaling and frame generation.
The developers at Gearbox are promising a day-one patch that should improve performance. But PC gamers should check their system configurations in advance.
