2K Games has published Nvidia’s recommended “optimized settings” for Borderlands 4 on PC, intended to guide players toward the best performance–visual balance. Instead, the advice has sparked backlash. Within hours, forums and social feeds were filled with complaints that even flagship hardware couldn’t deliver smooth gameplay. “Even with a 9800X3D and a 5090 it runs like absolute buttcheeks,” one widely shared post fumed, raising new questions about the state of the port.
Flagship Hardware Falters as Frame Times Spike
Player telemetry suggests average FPS looks fine on paper, but frame pacing is a mess. Frame times swing from the low teens to 60ms or worse, leaving even top rigs stuttering through firefights. Nvidia’s guidance—DLSS Balanced, Frame Generation, and Reflex—fails to mask deeper problems. Reports cite:
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Severe frame-time spikes: Smooth averages undermined by 40–80ms stutters.
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Traversal and streaming hitches: Micro-pauses in dense hubs and fast movement despite SSDs.
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Underutilized GPUs: High-end cards idling while CPU scheduling chokes.
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VRAM volatility: Ultra textures and ray tracing cause unpredictable stalls.
Players argue this isn’t a horsepower issue but one of asset streaming, shader compilation, and CPU threading. The community wants code-level fixes: shader precompilation, optimized asset streaming, improved threading, and quick hotfixes.
Inside Nvidia and 2K’s Optimized Preset
The preset leaves ray-traced reflections and ambient occlusion on, leaning on DLSS Balanced and Frame Generation to recover performance. It lowers shadows, volumetrics, and some post-processing but leaves CPU-heavy crowd density and draw distance largely untouched. The result:
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Why it stutters: CPU-bound scenes, shader hitches, and VRAM spikes.
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Why it looks odd: DLSS shimmer on cel-shaded edges, FG artifacts in heavy effects.
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Why it underdelivers: RT left on, crowd density unchanged, and Ultra textures taxing memory.
Practical Settings for Stable QHD Performance
For 1440p stability:
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Path Tracing: Off – Extreme cost and volatile frame pacing.
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Ray-Traced Reflections: Off – Big hit for minimal gain.
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Volumetrics: Medium – Preserves atmosphere with less cost.
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Shadows: High – Near-Ultra visuals, better performance.
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Textures: Ultra – Minimal fps impact on 12 GB+ cards.
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DLSS Quality + Nvidia Reflex – Better detail and latency than Balanced.
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Frame Generation: Off if latency-sensitive—good for pad play, risky for mouse aim.
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Cap FPS just below refresh (e.g., 141 on 144 Hz) and use G-Sync/FreeSync.
Fixing Stutter Until Patches Land
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Update drivers cleanly using Nvidia/AMD tools.
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Clear shader caches after patches or driver changes.
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Cap frame rate 2–3 fps under your monitor’s refresh.
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Disable overlays like Steam, Discord, Xbox Game Bar, or background capture.
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Use borderless fullscreen to smooth pacing during alt-tabs.
These steps won’t replace a hotfix but can stabilize frametimes and reduce traversal hitches. Re-test after patches, recheck caps when changing refresh rates, and keep overlays off during troubleshooting.
For now, Nvidia’s and 2K’s “optimized” sheet feels like a stopgap. The real test will be the speed and transparency of patches and drivers. If flagship CPUs and GPUs are faltering, players expect more than toggles—they want evidence of deeper fixes. Borderlands 4 doesn’t just need better frame pacing; it needs to restore trust that its on-screen chaos isn’t mirrored by chaos under the hood.
