Borderlands 3 system requirements, settings, benchmarks, and performance analysis

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Early impressions of Borderlands 3 suggest that, despite seven years (and a raft of rival loot shooters) having passed since Borderlands 2, Gearbox has stuck to its however-many-millions of guns. At its core, Borderlands 3 is still about ganging up with a few friends, extinguishing a few thousand lives, and using the bodies as randomized loot vending machines.

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As our partner for these detailed performance analyses, MSI provided the hardware we needed to test Borderlands 3 on a bunch of different AMD and Nvidia GPUs, multiple CPUs, and several laptops. See below for the full details, along with our Performance Analysis 101 article. Thanks, MSI!

What has changed, thankfully, is the tech. The jump from Unreal Engine 3 to UE4 has brought improved lighting, shadows, and effects to the series’ signature hand-drawn style, and publisher 2K has said the whole game was “developed from the ground up” to take advantage of AMD’s most recent Radeon GPUs and 3rd-gen Ryzen CPUs.

As such, it supports AMD’s FidelityFX suite, and notably goes without the DLSS and ray tracing features offered by Nvidia RTX cards. Don’t worry too much if you’re on team GeForce, though: we’ve been testing Borderlands 3 across a range of GPUs and CPUs, and it looks like it will run at least decently on any hardware. Yes, even the cheap stuff.

First, though, let’s look at the PC features list for Borderlands 3.

(Image credit: Future)

This is about as complete a list as we’ve seen, though depending on your monitor getting an ultrawide or doublewide resolution to work may require using borderless windowed mode. Ultrawide and doublewide did show up with an appropriate monitor, and the FOV automatically adjusts to the wider resolutions (though it still says 90). HUD customizations are also available, though under the Gameplay menu. That leaves mod support as the odd man out yet again. Sigh.

Other highlights are the fully uncapped framerate, letting your GPU run wild and free. On a 60Hz display, we also saw options for 30/60/120 caps, while a 144Hz display gave us even more options (like 72 and 24). You can adjust distinct FOV settings for whether you’re in FPS mode or driving one of the game’s many murdercars, and key bindings are fully customizable.

You also have a choice of running in DX11 or DX12 modes. For now, using pre-launch code, it’s better to stick with DX11, as we ran into a couple of fairly major issues with DX12 mode.

[Please note: I’ve retested Borderlands 3 with the final public release. That includes rerunning all the benchmarks on the GPUs, CPUs, and notebooks. The charts are all updated, but I still need to rewrite some of the text. Some of the settings descriptions are slightly outdated right now.]

Yeah, this is “fullscreen” DX12 mode. It will hopefully be fixed in the release version.

(Image credit: Gearbox / Future)

We’re testing a review version of Borderlands 3, not retail code, so things might improve with the final game.

First, it uses your desktop resolution in “fullscreen” mode, with the game relegated to a portion of the screen. If you have a 4K display and set the game to fullscreen 1080p, you end up with the game occupying the top-left quadrant of the display. The solution is to drop the desktop resolution to 1080p before launching the game. And to reiterate, this does not happen in DX11 mode.

Second, DX12 mode somehow causes the intro videos to stall, delaying the trip to the main menu by as much as 2-3 minutes. These are bugs that can be fixed, but right now both make DX11 better. But there’s a third concern.

DX12 performance is a little lower on AMD GPUs, on average, than when running DX11. DX12 mode is faster at the low and medium quality presets, but also drops to lower minimum framerates than DX11, while at high and ultra, DX11 is faster outright. Meanwhile on Nvidia GPUs, running in DX12 mode limited the framerate to 120 fps for some reason, even with vsync disabled.

Admittedly, we were testing a review version of Borderlands 3, not retail code, so things might improve with the final game. However, for these early benchmarks, we’re sticking with DX11. We’ll verify the above with the retail game as soon as that’s available.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Borderlands 3 system requirements

The official system requirements don’t immediately throw up any red flags; as we’re about to see, semi-recent budget GPUs will comfortably handle 1080p low, so the older models listed in the minimum requirements have a good shot at 30 fps. The only potential issue is likely to be RAM, if you’re somehow still on 4GB. (If so, please, upgrade your PC.)

Minimum:

  • OS: Windows 7/8/10 (latest service pack)
  • CPU: AMD FX-8350/Intel Core i5-3570
  • Memory: 6GB RAM
  • GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7970/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB
  • Storage: 75GB free

Recommended:

  • OS: Windows 7/8/10 (latest service pack)
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600/Intel Core i7-4770
  • Memory: 16GB RAM
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 590/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
  • Storage: 75GB free

Gearbox doesn’t state what the minimum or recommended specs will get you in terms of settings or framerates, other than the resolution. Our testing suggests the recommended specs will handle 1080p ultra, though not at 60 fps. Rather ambitiously, the Borderlands 3 website lists these as being for “1440p gaming”—not if you also want ultra quality, friend. The RX 590 might be able to scrape 30 fps with this combination of resolution and settings, but the GTX 1060 falls short, so we’re going to assume 2K is recommending 1440p and a lower quality setting.

For the best 1080p experience, I’d sooner recommend an RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 5700, both of which will deliver 60 fps on ultra. They’ll also put up a respectable fight at 1440p ultra, though strictly speaking you’ll need at least an RTX 2080—quite the upgrade—for a 60 fps average.

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Borderlands 3 PC performance charts

(Image credit: Future)

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Borderlands 3 PC performance charts

(Image credit: Future)

Borderlands 3 settings overview

Borderlands 3 has a built-in benchmarking tool, which makes it easy to see how all the different graphics quality options impact performance. What’s surprising is that for many, the answer is “not much at all.”

The graphs above show how an RX 5700 and RTX 2060 perform using the four main presets, and then with ultra quality plus each individual setting turned down to minimum.

FXAA is one of the least GPU-hungry anti-aliasing techniques around and has a negligible effect on overall performance. Even temporal AA doesn’t hurt performance much. You might as well leave AA on, whatever your hardware, though some will prefer FXAA over temporal AA. Interestingly, FidelityFX Sharpening basically undoes a bit of the blurriness you get from temporal AA, again with a negligible performance impact. You can probably leave it on as well, unless you’re running very low-end hardware.

Borderlands 3 screenshots

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Texture streaming, anisotropic filtering, shadows, terrain detail, character texture detail, and even screen space reflections all seem like things that should drop performance a bit, but in practice none of them matter much for Borderlands 3. At most you’re looking at an extra 4-5 percent increase in performance by turning down shadows, so that might be worth sacrificing in a pinch, but the others can be safely left on high.

What, then, does make a meaningful difference? The most prolific frame bandit is volumetric fog, which in return contributes some handsome god rays. Opt for more basic lighting by turning it off, and performance jumps 24 percent, which could make or break performance on lower-end GPUs.

Foliage detail—you can probably guess what that covers—is another niche but expensive option, with its low setting improving performance by nearly 12 percent over its highest setting.

Draw distance affects the level of detail and amount of distant objects. Turning this to low can boost performance by up to 12 percent, but this is one that we prefer to leave at maximum if at all possible.

The only other individual setting that’s as impactful is material quality, which can grant a 14 percent boost if set to low. This appears to be a global setting for how detailed surfaces look, so it’s important if you’re serious about maximizing fidelity, but for the more performance-minded it will speed things up if reduced. Environment detail, in a similar vein, will net you a smaller seven percent performance game when minimized.

source: gamezpot.com