I Mostly Fixed ‘Borderlands 4’ Performance With Two Settings Changes
Borderlands 4 is a great game. It is possibly the best Borderlands 4 game they’ve made. But it has been plagued by performance issues that Gearbox’s CEO has spiraled about, but Gearbox itself has reassured fans are being worked on. This is stuttering, crashing and other issues, even on high-end hardware way above recommended specs, which is baffling some.
I have tried many, many things to fix this, even working with Gearbox directly behind the scenes to do so. In the end, between that and other research from players, I have two things that have worked for me in terms of A) solving a totally disastrous problem and B) helping with more general performance issues.
I definitely cannot promise at all this will work for everyone. It’s only on PC, not console, and my knowledge of one of these only extends to NVIDIA settings. And this has fixed performance, not crashes, as I’m still getting a good amount of those.
The biggest change I’ve gotten in terms of boosting performance has nothing to do with DLSS Performance mode or reducing volumetric fog. It’s changing the size of my PC’s shader cache outside the game.
Shaders are a serious problem within Borderlands 4, and you see them load all the time quickly or slowly and they are a big factor in what’s going on here. What you do here is pretty easy:
NVIDIA Control Panel
NVIDIA Control Panel
- You go to the NVIDIA control panel on your computer (mine is in my taskbar)
- Go to 3D settings then Manage 3D settings
- Scroll down to Shader Cache Size and change it from Driver Default (if it’s on that) to something else. I’d recommend 100 GB.
- That’s it. It really helped performance a good amount. Absolutely not perfect and it may not work for you, but it’s worth a try. It is essentially the only thing I did that significantly helped at all.
The second thing has to do with a more disastrous issue I had that made me unable to play the game at all. In two instances now, one pre-release during the review period, one a few days ago, I’ve had the game crash then need to re-do the shaders. But once that done, the entire game is just hitching and stuttering to the point where it’s not just frame drops, it’s absolutely impossible to play. You check your PC and it is suddenly using 100% of your CPU, which is why this is happening. Good lord.
There is a firm fix to this one, and one I got from Gearbox directly (I’m not sure how I would have figured this out otherwise). That one is:
- In Steam right click on Borderlands and go to Properties.
- In the General Tab there is a blank space under Launch Options.
- Enter “-ClearPSODriverCache” there (with the dash).
- Launch the game. It will likely re-do the shaders again, but the CPU and stutter problem should be fixed.
- Exit the game and go and delete -ClearPSODriverCache from the launch field as you don’t want to do it twice. Now, you can play again.
This may not affect a large number of users, but I’ve already talked to a few who have run into this problem, and again, I cannot imagine it would be common knowledge how to fix this on your own, so I really hope this helps.
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