As I wrote in my PC Performance Analysis a few months ago, Borderlands 4 had serious performance problems when it launched on PC. The game was poorly optimized and had many technical issues. Now, in December 2025, a big new PC update has been released, and it promises to fix many of those problems.
Going into more details, Borderlands 4 now uses Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO). According to the devs, this allows the executable to run more efficiently and brings large CPU performance gains. They have optimized grass, shrubs, and other foliage by updating their meshes and materials, reducing the cost of drawing them on screen.
Moreover, the devs added several GPU optimizations from newer versions of Unreal Engine. Performance has been improved for Lumen lighting, foliage reflections, and water. In-game cutscenes now run at higher frame rates instead of being locked to 30FPS. There are also extra performance improvements for lower-end PCs, especially in areas with grass, dynamic shadows, and wind effects.
And that’s not all. The December 11th Update improved how VRAM is used by reorganizing texture and mesh memory pools, allowing the game to keep better visual quality at lower graphics settings without hurting performance. This will give a big performance boost to GPUs with 8GB of VRAM.
We also got improvements to Physics and Niagara to reduce memory leaks and Out-of-Memory crashes. Improvements have been made to Cloth initialization to reduce load and spawn cost time, too. The devs have also improved the shader pre-compilation phase. As such, you will now get fewer PSO stutters while playing.
Another big improvement is the removal of extra lights that were not needed, especially lights used for volumetric clouds. The December 11th patch also changes how many enemies and NPCs can spawn in some areas, so they no longer appear in larger numbers than intended. This helps improve performance and makes gameplay feel smoother. Finally, the update adds new graphics options that let you turn off shadows, volumetric clouds, and fog.
But what does this mean in practice? YouTube’s Daniel Owen has tested this update and shared his findings. On GPUs with 8GB of VRAM, the performance improvements are huge. Thanks to this update, you can now run Borderlands 4 with higher framerates on High Settings on a GPU like the NVIDIA RTX 5060Ti 8GB. On Max Settings, you can almost double your performance.
Regarding stuttering, the game still seems to have some shader compilation stutters. However, overall experience appears to be better than the one we got at launch. Borderlands 4 now has fewer stutters. So, this isn’t a placebo patch. This did improve things.
Like always, Steam will download this update the next time you launch its client. Those interested can find its full patch notes here.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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