Did Borderlands 4 Upgrade Their Version Of Unreal Engine 5?

The latest Borderlands 4 has upgraded the game in a huge way.

EpicNNG made note of this upgrade on Twitter:

Borderlands 4 has seemingly switched to a new version of Unreal Engine 5, bringing with it a host of performance improvements to the game.

They have seemingly also toned down the LODs on numerous foliage throughout the game, in addition to changes to their lighting system.

What The Developers Say

The developers added a note about this on the game’s latest patch notes:

Over the past few months, the team has been investigating how to deliver the best runtime performance possible with Borderlands 4.

Since launching, we’ve discovered a number of fixes that deliver noticeable framerate boosts and reduce stuttering without making sacrifices in visual quality.

Some of the fixes are improvements to our code or content; other fixes come from later versions of Epic’s Unreal Engine..

These performance improvements are available on all platforms, but we’re especially focused on how they affect the PC.

We’ve measured framerate improvements of between 9% and 20% on minimum-spec and recommended-spec PC hardware, and we’re looking forward to hearing about the results from players with these systems.

Some Of The Major Performance Improvements

They also shared details on what has been updated. There’s a lot here, but we’ve handpicked some noteworthy improvements:

• The game now uses Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), which allows the executable to run more efficiently and brings large CPU performance gains
• Optimized grass, shrubs, and other foliage by updating their meshes and materials, reducing the cost of drawing them on screen
• Added several GPU optimizations pulled in from newer versions of Unreal Engine
• Improved the performance of the Lumen lighting system
• In-engine cinematics now run at higher framerates, instead of being capped at 30 FPS
• Added new graphics options that lets players turn off shadows, volumetric clouds, and fog, offering better performance flexibility
• Improved how VRAM is used by reorganizing texture and mesh memory pools, allowing the game to keep better visual quality at lower graphics settings without hurting performance

How Will Borderlands 4 Work On The Switch 2?

At this point, it seems clear that the Switch 2 delay is a blessing in disguise. The improvements that Gearbox brought to Borderlands 4 thanks to the new version of Unreal will also optimize the game better on that platform.

While it would obviously be terrible to make Switch 2 owners wait forever, this leaves us hopeful that that platform will be optimized when the title launches there.