Borderlands 4 PC Performance Red Flags: RTX 5090 Dips to 60–80 FPS in Fights

Borderlands 4’s Early PC Tests Raise Eyebrows – Even on God-Tier Hardware

This caught my attention because Borderlands chaos has always been a stress test for PCs, but seeing a rig with an RTX 5090 and Ryzen 9 9950X3D dip into the 60-80fps range during fights at 1440p with DLSS Quality? That’s a red flag. Jackfrags’ early video shows exactly that: 120-130fps while wandering, but heavy drops and stutters as soon as combat kicks off, plus texture pop-ins and flickering lights. If a monster PC is wobbling, mid-range rigs are going to feel it hard.

Key Takeaways

• RTX 5090 + 9950X3D at 2560×1440 with DLSS Quality still sees dips to 60-80fps in combat.
• Stutters, texture pop-in, and lighting flicker suggest streaming or shader issues, not just raw GPU load.
• The “Badass” preset isn’t actually max – there are higher options in the menus, which is odd messaging.
• If this holds at launch, mid/low-end PCs will need aggressive settings tweaks to keep 1% lows sane.

Breaking Down the Test: What’s Actually Happening

The setup here is as stacked as it gets: Nvidia’s RTX 5090 paired with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D, running Borderlands 4 at 2560×1440 on the “Badass” preset with DLSS set to Quality. Outside of fights, the counter sits around 120–130fps. The moment particles, explosions, and enemy packs enter the scene, frame rates sag to roughly 100fps, then tank to 60–80fps after the first boss encounter – with occasional spikes to 100 when the action calms down.

That delta matters. Drops of 25% during firefights aren’t just academic; they tell you where the engine struggles: when effects stack, AI wakes up, and physics/ragdolls spawn. Throw in reports of stutter, texture pop-in, and flickering lights, and the picture looks less like “GPU can’t handle it” and more like CPU-heavy moments plus asset streaming or shader compilation hiccups. DLSS Quality lowers internal resolution a lot at 1440p; if performance still crumbles, you’re likely hitting CPU or engine bottlenecks.

The strangest wrinkle? The “Badass” preset isn’t truly maxed. There are still settings you can push higher in the menus. That’s not unheard of — some games keep the absolute top toggles out of presets — but it’s eyebrow-raising when the near-max preset already stumbles on cutting-edge hardware.

Why a Cartoony Shooter Can Still Melt Your Frames

Borderlands’ style screams “lightweight,” but the tech under the inked outlines is anything but. Think: thick particle storms, alpha-heavy explosions, volumetric effects, hordes of enemies, dynamic lights, physics, and heaps of draw calls. That cocktail can hammer both GPU and CPU. This is exactly why fights crater performance while walking around the wasteland feels silky — combat is where everything stacks at once.

It also tracks with the series’ history. Borderlands 3’s DX12 mode launched with stutter and shader-related nastiness on PC, and while patches smoothed a lot over, the first impression was rough. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands had its own early jitters. If Borderlands 4 is following that pattern, we’re likely looking at a cocktail of shader compilation stutter, asset streaming timing, and uneven CPU scaling under heavy load. Those are fixable, but they need time — and often driver updates — to dial in.

What PC Players Should Expect (and Tweak)

If a 5090/9950X3D can drop into the 60–80fps range during firefights at 1440p, mid-range cards (say, RTX 3060/3070/4060-level) will almost certainly need compromises. Prioritize consistent frame times over raw peaks. Practical moves:

• Cap your frame rate at 90–100 to stabilize 1% lows and help VRR/G-Sync do its thing.
• Lower CPU-heavy settings first: foliage density, shadows, crowd/enemy counts (if exposed), and physics/particle quality.
• DLSS: Quality at 1440p if GPU-limited; Balanced/Performance at 4K. If the bottleneck is CPU, dropping resolution or enabling upscaling won’t fix the worst dips — the settings above will.
• Enable low-latency modes (Nvidia Reflex) to improve responsiveness during dips.
• If the game offers different rendering backends, test both; pick the one with fewer shader stutters, even if peak fps is lower.

Handheld PC players should temper expectations. If deck-like devices are on your mind, this early footage hints you’ll be targeting 30–40fps with aggressive cuts unless a significant patch lands. It’s a loot shooter — responsiveness matters more than eye candy.

The Red Flags — And Reasons for Cautious Optimism

Red flags are clear: notable dips on apex hardware, visible streaming artifacts, and a top preset that isn’t truly top. We’ve seen too many messy PC launches in recent years to shrug this off. At the same time, early PC builds often ship with shader pipeline quirks and streaming thresholds that get tuned quickly. Gearbox did improve Borderlands 3 post-launch, and driver teams tend to move fast when flagship GPUs underperform on big releases.

So, should you buy now? If you’re sensitive to stutter and you don’t have a bleeding-edge rig, wait a week or two for patches and independent benchmarks across mid-range GPUs. If you dive in day one, plan to tweak settings — and don’t let the “Badass” label fool you into thinking there’s no headroom to adjust.

TL;DR

Borderlands 4 is dipping to 60–80fps during heavy combat on an RTX 5090 and Ryzen 9 9950X3D at 1440p with DLSS Quality. That suggests CPU/engine bottlenecks and streaming issues, not just raw GPU load. If you’re not rocking top-tier hardware, expect to tweak settings — or wait for patches — to keep firefights feeling smooth.