Technical experts warn of stutter and cutscene drops for Borderlands 4 on PC, while Pitchford pushes back against the criticism.
Borderlands 4 may have smashed series records on Steam by peaking at over 300,000 concurrent players, but excitement is being clouded by reports of poor PC performance.
Technical experts have flagged major problems with stutter, cutscene drops, and inefficient graphics settings, while Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has fired back at critics, telling them to “code your own engine and show us how it’s done.”
Experts call Borderlands 4’s "Badass" preset “woefully inefficient”
Digital Foundry Tech expert Alex Battaglia pointed to shader compilation stutter as a major culprit, with the game hitching whenever new assets appear,whether that’s a weapon pickup or an enemy animation. “The stutter issue makes the experience feel less polished,” he said, adding that the way vegetation flips into animation looked “a little weird.”
Real-time cutscenes being locked to 30fps also drew criticism, as it caused sudden drops from higher framerates in gameplay. Rich Leadbetter noted that stutter occurred “on the fastest gaming CPU that money can buy,” suggesting the problem isn’t limited to low-end setups.
Borderlands 4’s "Badass" graphics preset also came under fire. Battaglia advised players to avoid it, calling it “woefully inefficient” and “placebo level stuff.”
Another expert said in the discussion that the game “does seem to be running worse than usual for an Unreal Engine 5 game,” falling short of the standard expected from the engine.
Gearbox has since posted a Nvidia optimisation guide on Steam and rolled out a silent update with no patch notes, but according to tests, performance issues remain unresolved.
Pitchford tells PC players: “If you don’t like it, code your own engine”
Randy Pitchford has defended Borderlands 4’s PC performance in a series of posts on X, pushing back against criticism from players and experts alike.
“Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing,” he wrote, adding that it was a mistake to expect systems between minimum and recommended specs to deliver ultra features, maximum resolution, and extremely high framerates all at once.
He also insisted that the game was “pretty damn optimal” and said PC users needed to balance their expectations with their hardware.
Pitchford stressed that Borderlands 4 gives players “a lot of tools” to balance framerate, resolution, and rendering features, and that they should adjust settings if unhappy with performance. He argued that the looter-shooter was running “without wasteful cycles on bad processes” and described the launch as “an amazing and fun and huge” campaign that was six years in the making.
At the same time, he acknowledged the intensity of the response. “We appreciate the incredibly high degree of passion and excitement … we know strong feelings leads to strong opinions. We hear you and see you,” he posted. While admitting there were “a few real issues”, Pitchford maintained these were “affecting a very, very small percentage of users” and were already being fixed.
When one user suggested Gearbox should have made Borderlands 4 look good without AI upscaling, Pitchford delivered one of his sharpest responses yet: “Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off,” he replied, adding sarcastically that the “world’s greatest hardware companies” and graphics engineers apparently “don’t know what you seem to know.”
Pitchford also pointed to internal data showing that only 0.04% of installs had valid PC performance issues flagged through customer service. He claimed most complaints seen online did not reflect the reality shown by telemetry, even if “1,000 posts feels like everyone the way internet chatter works.”
For Pitchford, the takeaway was clear: Borderlands 4 was running as intended for the vast majority of players, and those dissatisfied needed to adjust settings, lower expectations, or request a refund rather than expect the game to perform equally across all hardware.
With Gearbox already rolling out patches, the real test now is whether those updates can come quickly enough to steady Borderlands 4’s rocky PC launch and win back player confidence.
