While there have been no shortage of reports about performance problems present in the PC version of Borderlands 4, it looks like consoles aren’t too far behind with the title. PS5 Pro players have been reporting poor performance with the game, with it getting worse the longer you play. This, some have speculated, might be the result of a memory leak—a technical problem related to how a program handles memory allocation that can cause performance issues like slow downs or even crashes.
As noted by one user on the Borderlands subreddit, Borderlands 4 on PS5 and PS5 Pro tends to play well for an hour before performance starts deteriorating. The degree to which the performance of the title starts getting worse seemingly varies from player to player, and likely also has more to do with how far into the game one might be. One user even noted that they start getting crashes the moment they hit the main menu.
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has taken to social media to confirm that the performance deterioration, especially on the PS5 Pro, is a known issue for Borderlands 4, and that the studio is actively working on a fix. In the meantime, Pitchford recommends that players should quit the game and restart it when players start noticing performance dips.
“Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play,” wrote Pitchford. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!”
While reports have indicated that initial sales for Borderlands 4 have been quite good—with a reported 2 million copies sold during its launch week—the title has been plagued by performance issues, with several players complaining about how it runs on even powerful PCs. Several Borderlands fans had taken to social media to complain about these issues, to which Pitchford, in a lengthy series of posts, told players to simply refund the game if they weren’t satisfied with it.
“You can do whatever you want,” wrote Pitchford. “The game is the game. Please get a refund from Steam if you aren’t happy with it. You made an analogy to a vehicle. I would not put a Ferrari engine in a monster truck and expect it to drive like a Ferrari. If you tell me about your specification, I can help you optimize your performance.”
Pitchford also placed quite a bit of emphasis on DLSS and how the technology makes it possible for Borderlands 4 to maintain a stable frame rate without having to tinker around with the game’s settings. For those that don’t want to use DLSS, he also noted that there were plenty of graphical options to play around with so that players can find their preferred compromise between visual fidelity and frame rate.
“I’m sorry you don’t like being told to use DLSS, but that is the way,” he wrote. “If you’re not happy using the tools available to you to improve frame rate and you’re not happy with the frame rate you have, you should play a different game. The game is awesome and it is designed to be just fine of an experience at 30fps and feel great at 60fps. We also have provided a lot of options for you to make different trade offs between frame rate, resolution, and graphics features than we would make and we encourage you to use those tools to optimize to your taste. Would you like help tuning your experience better to your liking?”
Borderlands 4 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It will also be coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 on October 3. For more details, check out our review.
