Let’s say you’re a PC player, but your machine isn’t all that powerful. A low-end gaming laptop, an outdated PC, a cheaper handheld device like the Steam Deck or MSI Claw’s launch model. If you look at the lofty system requirements of Borderlands 4 below, chances are, your PC may not meet all that jazz, and you may have to sit this one out. 8GB VRAM as the bare minimum? 16GB RAM just to start the game? 8-core CPU is mandatory? Woof, that sounds demanding, even for an Unreal Engine 5 game. But does the game actually require such a beefy rig? Let’s find out!
Here at XboxEra, we love playing on a variety of platforms and devices. We all have our preferences, and the name of the site may give you a general hint as to what most of us tend to play on, but we love to keep it varied anyway. Personally, while I own most consoles and a decent gaming PC, I do have a handful of lower end Windows-based devices too, such as a laptop with a 4GB VRAM RTX 3050, or the launch model of the MSI Claw, which fares well with slightly older games and indies but is certainly not equipped to deal with demanding Unreal Engine 5 games, such as Echoes of the End – which would be virtually unplayable even on the absolute lowest settings on the latter two devices. I own various games on PC where I simply can not turn the settings low enough to have a gameplay that isn’t a slideshow. I’d argue that’s the games’ fault, too, to an extent, but these devices certainly won’t brute force through poorly optimized games.
The requirements above for Borderlands 4 are even more ludicrous, and a quick glance at Steam’s own hardware surveys reveals that half of their userbase doesn’t have a computer good enough to meet these demands. Can a game employing the comic book style cel-shaded look be really that demanding? We live in the era of resolution scaling, frame generation, AI upscaling and other fancy-sounding tech, which can greatly increase performance on such games, though often at the cost of some image clarity. Still, better being able to play a visually compromised version than none at all, right?
The screen above was taken on my laptop, employing a very solid i7-12700H with 20 cores as CPU, having the 16GB RAM needed for the game, but also falling very short on the GPU side, with its laptop version of the RTX 3050 only packing 4GB of VRAM – exactly half of the bare minimum the game seems to demand. Yet, by turning virtually every setting to Low and choosing FSR frame generation in Balanced mode, the game would stick to a playable 25-35fps even during some of the most intense combat, with exploration sticking to 45-60fps for the most part. The game definitely looks a bit soft, due to the upscaling techniques employed, but despite the frame gen there’s no noticeable input lag, with the shooting feeling snappy and precise, on mouse and controller alike.
I decided to go even lower in specs though, as I installed the game on my MSI Claw A1M – the weakest of the MSI Claw family of handheld PCs, packing a respectable Inter Core Ultra 5 135H with 14 cores, 16GB RAM once again, but with a much lower end Intel Arc graphics card that, benchmarks at hand, absolutely should fall below what Borderlands 4 demands. By once again lowering most settings and, this time, choosing Intel’s own upscaler technology, XeSS, I managed to nail a similar look as I did on my laptop, though with slightly lower framerate; rarely any drops under 25fps in more messy action sequences, but a lot of gameplay around 30fps, with peaks of about 40. I could go higher by lowering the quality of the generation to Ultra Performance, but the visual downgrade wasn’t worth the extra few FPS. Jesse, who reviewed the game, ran some quick tests on the Steam Deck and the Legion Go, obtaining solid results without much tinkering from the get go as well. Borderlands 4 is surprisingly well optimized, especially for an Unreal Engine 5 game.
Is this a really optimal way to play Borderlands 4, a visually quite impressive Unreal Engine 5 game? Probably not. But with the game running alright on Xbox Series S and an upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 port, it seemed evident that Gearbox managed to create a surprisingly scalable title all around, one that can be played with acceptable performances even on machines that don’t quite meet the very high requirements the game has. This is mainly due to an excellent implementation of frame-gen and resolution scaling, something a lot of games fail to do efficiently.
I don’t quite have the tools to provide a more thorough technical analysis, but I tested the game on two machines that should not run Borderlands 4, and they did. I had to compromise with the visuals a lot and use frame generation, but it runs fine enough to be playable. I know that is more than enough for a lot of players. Feel free to let us know in the comments how the game runs on your machines!
