It looks like Gearbox might have figured out that big bug that broke performance for Borderlands 4.
They added this line to the latest patch:
Added auto-clearing of Borderlands 4 stale shaders on version update, preventing performance degradation on some PCs.
This was part of a patch that was otherwise dedicated to buffing up all the Vault Hunters.
When Did This Issue Come Out?
Borderlands 4 had been having performance issues since it launched. Those issues took away from the game, but not to the point that it ruined the launch.
Since that time, Gearbox has been putting up patch after patch. The latest patch before this one came on September 19.
While this patch was supposed to cover stability issues, players found that it made the game run worse for some of them.
What made this issue even more pernicious is that it affected some but not all PC players.
The Infamous Shader Cache Clearing
Around last week, Gearbox said that players just needed to let the game compile shaders while they were playing them.
They advised players that they should expect stuttering but that they would be cleared out after 15 minutes.
Infamously, EpicNNG advised fans that if their PC build didn’t sort itself out, they might have to clear the GPU shade cache.
What that means is EpicNNG believed some players would have to restart the whole process of recompiling shaders.
So, No More Shade For Gearbox?
As of this writing, we are not 100 % sure if this new update has fixed this shader compilation issue. We haven’t seen players go online with complaints yet, but that’s not proof the issues are gone.
The description does sound like it has addressed the main problem, the shaders not compiling and updating properly.
And we do expect Gearbox to sort out all of the game’s performance issues eventually. But it can be frustrating for fans if it becomes persistent for much longer.
Let’s Hope Gearbox Sorts It Out Immediately
It may sound like nitpicking to be calling out Gearbox to make their game run better. Isn’t this normal in game development?
But we would point to the cautionary tale of Payday 3. That game had an even worse launch than Borderlands 4.
Payday 3 failed to rebound so poorly that it’s now in near maintenance mode. Starbreeze itself has had layoffs from 2024 to 2025.
We wish the best for the developers who were laid off from Starbreeze.
