Borderlands 4 System Requirements, Can Your Rig Handle It

I mean nvidia dlss 4 with multi frame generation is literally a game changer for heavy UE5 titles like this and amd fsr 4 upscaling means you're covered regardless of which gpu you're running. Basically everyone gets playable frames now which is honestly such a relief compared to the dark ages of upscaling tech a few years ago. And the fact that both camps get their best upscaling tech at launch instead of one side waiting 6 months for a patch is pretty refreshing ngl.

ngl when I saw native 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios confirmed I actually felt a wave of relief no more messing around with hex edits or flawless widescreen patches just to get rid of those infuriating black bars that have haunted ultrawide gamers for years you know the struggle if you've ever had to troubleshoot widescreen fixes at 2am. Because let's be real ultrawide support in unreal engine games has been hit or miss and I was kinda worried bl4 would launch with the usual 16:9 lock and a forum thread full of angry 32:9 monitor owners.

so there's no frame rate cap on pc at all which is honestly how it should be and if you've got a 240hz or even one of those ridiculous 360hz monitors you can actually push every single frame your gpu can spit out. I'm kinda curious to see what kind of numbers a 5090 can pull on competitive settings tbh. But also I remember borderlands 3 had some weird physics issues above 120 fps so hopefully they sorted that out this time around you know those bugs where loot would just launch itself into orbit if your framerate was too high.

hardware ray tracing covers reflections shadows and global illumination through lumen and I've seen what UE5 lumen looks like in other recent games and tbh it's pretty stunning when everything comes together. Though I'll admit I'm a bit nervous about the performance hit on anything below a 4070 because ray tracing in open world games just chews through gpu resources like crazy. And I literally had to turn off RT entirely in wukong just to stay above 60 fps on my 3080 so I'm not super optimistic about ray traced BL4 on older cards.

there's a shader pre-compilation step that runs the first time you launch and you know what I genuinely prefer sitting through a 5 minute shader compile upfront rather than dealing with those awful traversal stutters that plague so many UE4 games. Honestly it's one of those small quality of life things that makes a huge difference in how the game actually feels to play. Anyway the first boot will take a while but after that you're good.

modding tools are coming post-launch building on everything the bl3 mod community already figured out and honestly some of the stuff modders did with bl3 was absolutely unhinged in the best way. So I'm pretty hyped to see what kind of chaos the community cooks up for bl4 rebalancing mods custom weapons reshade presets you get the idea. And if bl3's mod scene is anything to go by we'll probably see some pretty wild stuff within the first month.

expect around 80 to 100 gb for the base download and tbh there's probably going to be a day one patch on top of that somewhere in the 5 to 15 gb range because that's just how modern aaa releases work at this point. I've learned to just accept it and plan my download schedule accordingly. But ngl it still stings a little when you preload 90 gigs and then steam hits you with another 12 gb update the second the game unlocks.

once all the season pass content lands you could be looking at 150 gb or more and I mean that's a serious commitment in terms of ssd real estate so maybe start clearing out those games in your steam library that you haven't touched since 2022 or whatever we all have that backlog we pretend doesn't exist. Also keep in mind that borderlands dlc packs have historically been pretty chunky especially the campaign expansions so 150 gb might honestly be a conservative estimate if they follow the bl3 pattern.

an ssd is genuinely mandatory here not just a nice to have because hdd loading times on UE5 titles can literally go past 2 minutes and nobody in their right mind wants to stare at a loading screen that long. I tried running a UE5 game off a hard drive once and honestly never again it was like going back to dial up internet after having fiber. So just get an nvme drive even a budget one will be night and day compared to spinning rust.

if you're gaming on a laptop the rtx 4060 mobile gpu sits roughly around desktop rtx 2060 performance which lands right at minimum spec and anything packing an rtx 4070 mobile or better should handle 1440p high settings pretty comfortably. Just make sure you've got good cooling because these UE5 games turn laptops into space heaters and I've literally had my laptop thermal throttle on less demanding games than what bl4 is going to be. Also undervolting your cpu helps more than you'd think with UE5 titles.