Having Borderlands 4 Issues After The Latest Patch? You Might Need To (Sigh) Clear Your Shader Cache

Gearbox has shared an undesirable update about their last update.

They said this earlier today:

We’ve received reports that some players are experiencing reduced stability after downloading today’s update.

Stuttering issues should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile in the background while playing.

If you’re still experiencing issues after 15 minutes of continuous play, you can also clear your shader cache via your video card manufacturer’s approved method.

If you continue to experience issues, please send us a support ticket so we can help you troubleshoot!

They also linked to their support page where you get a ticket here.

What Happened With The Patch?

Gearbox’s latest patch promised improvements to stability and performance all around. They also promised other changes, but this was the biggest reasons that they rushed an update.

The consensus at launch was that Gearbox had made their best version of Borderlands so far. But the performance issues that the game was experiencing hampered its review scores and threatened to undermine all that work.

Unfortunately, as soon as the patch got published, fans noticed that their game performance was getting worse, not better. And so questions came up on whether they had made improvements at all.

Gearbox’s Critics Come Up To Defend Them

In an unexpected turn of events, some Borderlands fans who are also very well known critics of Gearbox stepped up to defend them this time around.

They mainly corroborated Gearbox’s claim that the game would stabilize and just had issues with shader compiling.

Ki11ersix shared this reply to the official Borderlands Twitter account’s statement:

To expand on this: quit the game once after launching and relaunch it. Now travel into a zone and back out (Idolator Sol’s or a Vault will work) this should compile a BUNCH of shaders and start improving the smoothness.

Shader compiling is rough.

For his part, EpicNNG shared this explanation:

PSA before everyone freaks out

Your game WILL stutter aggressively with this new patch. THIS IS NORMAL, do not uninstall and panic.

You will need to do a massive shader re-cache. This will include going to various areas, and doing various things.

It’s UE being garbo as usual.

Before anyone gets mad at me, save your tears for Gearbox.

I am just recommending that you don’t immediately panic and do something stupid, taking you out of the game for longer.

Let it do its thing. If it continues, clear your GPU shader cache (dear god)