As diplomatic and friendly as ever, Randy Pitchford isn't far from telling gamers to fuck off if they're not happy with the work done on Borderlands 4.
Just a few days ago, we reported on the system requirements for Borderlands 4, and while the game had not yet been released, we were particularly struck by the high demand for CPUs: an eight-core product was indeed announced as essential to launch Gearbox Software's title. Since then, Borderlands 4 has been on the market, and if the CPU issue doesn't seem to have caused much ink to flow - in the end - it's mainly because other problems invited themselves to the party and, in particular, a distinct lack of fluidity in rasterized animation.
For the first time, the development studio switched to the Unreal Engine 5, the engine used on Borderlands 4... but not in the most efficient way, if we are to believe the numerous comments from PC gamers, but also from testers such as those on the TechPowerUp site, who report performance that is, to say the least, "borderline": just think that a GeForce RTX 5060 isn't enough to run the game properly, simply in Full HD. And we're not talking about flirting with 60 frames per second and a little sluggishness now and then. No, on such a card, it's barely possible to achieve an average of 25 fps with graphics details set to maximum.
As these problems affect all graphics cards from all manufacturers to varying degrees, gamers are bound to complain. On Steam, "only" 65% of the 21,297 people who left a review were satisfied. This means that a third of gamers are not satisfied. For a production on the scale of Borderlands 4, this is clearly a poor performance. Through the voice of its founder, Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software has responded to the critics... in the most subtle way possible! To those criticizing performance, the answer is simple: " use DLSS ". Randy Pitchford explains that " it's an extraordinary technology " and that " the game was designed to exploit it ".
Pitchford forgets that DLSS is an NVIDIA proprietary technology and that, for example, it doesn't work on AMD or Intel graphics cards. What's more, while DLSS is a tremendous plus, can we accept that a game is not in the least playable without this kind of technology? At a pinch, if we were talking about a minor fluidity problem or a game with absolutely mind-blowing graphics! But no, nothing of the sort, Borderlands 4 isn't the bad guy, but it's nothing to wake up to in the middle of the night on a purely graphical level, and the fact that a GeForce RTX 5090 isn't even capable of delivering a constant 60 fps at 2560 x 1440 isn't normal.
Above all, don't talk to Randy Pitchford about lack of optimization. If you're not happy, " go and develop your own tools ", Randy Pitchford will be " delighted to use them ". However, he doesn't seem to remember thatUnreal Engine 5 wasn't developed by Gearbox Software, but by Epic Games: the studio just uses it, and apparently not as well as other teams.
