'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

Borderlands 4 is here, and Borderlands 4 is very demanding. This we know, after a launch last week mired in optimisation complaints, stuttering woes, and crashes. In response, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has been busy batting off critique regarding the game's performance on his X account over the weekend—although his comments don't appear to have gone down as well as he might have hoped.

"Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers. Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware," he posted on Saturday. "This is not a game made to run on 10-year-old PCs… if you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed."

The Gearbox head honcho also posted some performance advice based on his own experiences with the game: "I know a lot of you are dead set on playing at 4K with ultra max settings and using two or three-year-old hardware. You do you, but BL4 and UE5 are doing a lot and for me that trade off for frames isn't worth it."

"I play at 1440p with settings super high and am super happy with that trade off," Pitchford revealed among a series of posts containing various settings suggestions. "If you're not 4K stubborn and just want to have a great, fun time with higher perf, please consider running at 1440p resolution. If you've got a beast of a video card, you're probably fine at 4K. But if you're in the middle or close to min spec, I would definitely recommend making that trade."

Unsurprisingly, Pitchford's recommendations have gone down badly in the replies. "Calling players '4K stubborn' when you game struggles at 1080p on mainstream GPUs like the 3060 and 4060, cards that dominate the Steam charts… even at medium settings, frame rates dip under [the] 60s" says @Fallen1254. "Telling players to drop resolution to hide systemic inefficiency is damage control."

"I'm playing on an overclocked 5090/9800X3D at 4K" says @tMParagon. "I almost have the most expensive computer that you can buy commercially and I cannot crack 120 fps without frame gen."

Certainly, our Nick found that 120 fps was a long way off on a max spec PC in his early Borderlands 4 performance testing. Running the same RTX 5090-based GPU and CPU setup as the X user above (albeit at stock clocks) resulted in a mere 40 fps average at Native, without any DLSS or MFG help. A hefty dose of DLSS Performance boosted the frame rate up to 80 fps (with the odd hitch), but it's still a poor showing for the $2,000+ GPU.

And as for the suggestion that 4K gamers should drop the resolution down to 1440p? Well, that'll certainly boost the performance. But if you've got a 4K gaming monitor, 1440p won't scale exactly with the panel's native resolution, resulting in pixel stretching and a rather blurry image. I can't imagine there are many gamers that made the jump to an RTX 5090 while keeping their 1440p monitors, either, but there we go.

I spent some time in Borderlands 4 this weekend, playing on an RTX 5070 Ti/ Ryzen 7 7700X setup at 4K, and can report that with DLSS set to Balanced and MFG set to 3x, decently high frame rates are very much achievable. That being said, this is a machine I use for 4K gaming on a daily basis—and I can't think of another game that requires this much upscaling and Frame Generation help to get above the 100 fps mark on this particular PC.

If you're gaming on older hardware, it looks like Pitchford doesn't have a huge amount of sympathy for your plight—although he did have one last piece of advice to impart: "If you discover your system can’t run the game well by accident or wishful thinking and/or don’t want to try to mess with settings to make things good enough for you, please use the refund feature on Steam rather than have a subpar experience." Ouch.

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