Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
Borderlands 4 may be the latest chapter in an unfavorable narrative for Epic Games and their Unreal Engine 5.
What Is The Unreal 5 Discourse?
Within the past two years, gamers have noticed that many top AAA games have been shipping with performance issues. This has been observed for games in different genres, made by different studios and game companies, and at different scales.
We’ll even list the suspects for you below:
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
- Silent Hill 2 Remake
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Lords of the Fallen
- Wuchang: Fallen Feathers
- Oblivion Remastered
- Mafia: The Old Country
- Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Tim Sweeney Points The Finger At Developers
Tim Sweeney addressed the issue in a media interview in Korea. He said:
The main cause is the order of development.
Many studios build for top-tier hardware first and leave optimization and low-spec testing for the end. Ideally, optimization should begin early—before full content build-out.
We’re doing two things: strengthening engine support with more automated optimization across devices, and expanding developer education so ‘optimize early’ becomes standard practice.
If needed, our engineers can step in.
Game complexity is much higher than 10 years ago, so it’s hard to solve purely at the engine level; engine makers and game teams need to collaborate.
We’re also bringing Fortnite optimization learnings into Unreal Engine, so titles run better on low-spec PCs.
Regardless if Sweeney is right or wrong, or somewhere in the middle, the issue is not going away.
It’s Borderlands’ Turn
Borderlands community account Borderlands 4 Bulletin shared this on Twitter:
So far, after watching and reading everything on Borderlands 4’s performance, it seems Borderlands 4 is more CPU-heavy, which is the case for most Unreal Engine 5 games.
Yes! We have day one patches and whatnot. But the improvement they bring is not that significant. I have seen more than enough Embargo Documents with “We have a patch ready,” “There are some technical glitches, but our team is working on it,” and so on.
The recommended CPU requirement is Intel Core i7-12700 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, and still, the game is running poorly, even on Low Settings on a Ryzen 9 5950x (https://youtu.be/2bSuIrq0aKg).
Yes! You can disable CCDs from BIOS for slight better performance. But, the thing is, the game should run fine with recommended requirements on Low to Medium settings.
People have been waiting to play Borderlands 4 for years. We are just a week away from its global release. I hope they fix performance issues raised by a few CREATORS, who were brave enough to call it out.
Also, talking about Performance or things that need addressing doesn’t mean you HATE THE GAME.
I know Gearbox can fix this. They did manage to improve Borderlands 3’s performance to a decent extent compared to the launch day performance.
So Is Gearbox At Fault Too?
As Borderlands 4 Bulletin pointed out, Gearbox did have the same issues with Borderlands 3‘s launch. But this does not necessarily mean that Epic Games and Unreal Engine 5 are completed exonerated.
In fact, it’s entirely possible that both share some responsibility to some degree.
Maybe it’s not for us fans to debate this point, since there’s a real answer to this. What’s important now is for both Epic and these game developers to stop this from happening. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait that long for Borderlands 4 to get its fixes.
