Was A Borderlands 4 Preview Skewed By Faulty Hardware?

There’s an early Borderlands 4 PC performance preview that shared poor impressions over the weekend. But it turns out that preview may not have been entirely accurate.

Destructoid staff writer Scott Duwe shared a preview of Borderlands 4 last Thursday. He gave some good impressions for the game itself, but not its optimization.

The First Impressions On Performance

To quote Duwe:

One of the very few things holding back the game in its early hours, for me in my pre-release version I’ve been playing, is its performance on PC.

I’ve experienced numerous crashes, hitching, stuttering, and framerate drops, and I’ve only been able to find consistent performance with the game running on Low settings.

Duwe also explained that he did reach out to 2K PR to figure out if these performance issues were avoidable. At the time, his concerns were not yet addressed.

Duwe also admitted that his build was in between the minimum and Recommended specs. So performance wasn’t guaranteed to be at its best. But as he argued, the game still didn’t meet the basic expectation to run well enough on Medium settings.

The Big Sticking Point

Yesterday, Duwe shared a huge update on Twitter:

Updated this article just now with new info about my PC specs and issues. My PSU died two days ago and that looks to be the cause of the worst issues I was having.

He also confirmed the worst issues he experienced were tied to his busted PSU:

the worst ones like crashing and complete chugging, yeah. framerate is stable now with some hitching and drops but Gearbox says day one patch fixes that

More Food For Thought

Duwe also updated his article with further details. He revealed that Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford personally reached out on Twitter and said this:

Thank you for your kind words about the game. May I humbly recommend that it is best practice to publish your PC specification with any comment regarding performance.

 I have a report from 2k PR that you were playing on a PC with below minimum specification RAM and GPU.

You can read Duwe’s specs in the article if you’re interested. 2K PR told Duwe that they were:

…aware of an issue with several video cards impacting game performance, and Gearbox is working on a fix targeting the Day 1 patch at launch.

In conclusion, the final story regarding Borderlands 4’s optimization has not been confirmed yet. It’s too bad that this is yet another game that needs a Day One Patch to address these issues, but Gearbox is known for this.

So let’s hope for the best when it comes to Borderlands 4’s optimization.