Six months of complaints, two months of patches, and at the very least one public apology later, Gearbox is prepared to point out its math. Ahead of tomorrow’s major v1.5 update for Borderlands 4, the studio published an in depth PC performance breakdown comparing launch version 1.0.2 against the present construct, and the numbers are substantially higher than most players probably expected.
The headline figure is a roughly 43% native FPS gain on high end hardware. Gearbox’s own benchmark table shows an RTX 4080 test system going from 54.96 FPS to 78.43 FPS at 1440p Very High settings without upscaling. The minimum-spec configuration saw a jump from 37.32 to 52.79 FPS at 1080p Low. The advisable spec system moved from 44.89 to 56.54 FPS at 1440p High. Those translate to roughly 42.7%, 41.5%, and 26% gains, respectively. Gearbox rounds these to a headline claim of roughly 20% across the board in its official blog post, which is accurate as a median but undersells the high-end gains.
So where did those gains come from? Gearbox credits improvements across GPU, CPU, and general engine efficiency. The studio reworked how materials are pre-loaded for GPU driver detection on Borderlands 4’s notoriously weapons-heavy engine, improved Hierarchical Level of Detail rendering for distant areas, added Virtual Shadow Map caching to chop per-frame lighting recalculation costs from the day-night cycle, and cleaned up a laundry list of backend code that was unnecessarily hammering UI performance every frame. PSO compilation has also been refined to cut back the hitching that plagued the sport’s first months.
Stability has also meaningfully improved. The general crash rate is down from 0.63% of sessions at launch to 0.38%, and the share of players experiencing any crash has dropped from 17% to 9.35%. That’s still not great by absolute standards, but it surely’s movement in the suitable direction.
The v1.5 patch arrives today, March 26, and it’s not only a performance boost. It bundles the sport’s first paid Story Pack, “Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned,” alongside a batch of gameplay changes including Photo Mode, a rework of Harlowe’s Zero-Point motion skill, and UVHM adjustments. It’s a content update package that Borderlands 4 probably must have shipped with.
There are a few necessary caveats price flagging. First, these are Gearbox’s own benchmarks, and independent testing will tell the complete story when players actually get the update and begin playing. Second, the upscaled performance numbers improved by a smaller margin than the native gains, which suggests for those who’re already running DLSS or FSR quality mode the delta may feel less dramatic. Third, Gearbox explicitly says “we now have more to do,” which, refreshingly, is a developer acknowledging the work is unfinished somewhat than declaring victory and walking away.