Six months of complaints, two months of patches, and at least one public apology later, Gearbox is ready to show its math. Ahead of tomorrow’s major v1.5 update for Borderlands 4, the studio published a detailed PC performance breakdown comparing launch version 1.0.2 against the current build, and the numbers are substantially better than most players probably expected.
The headline figure is a roughly 43% native FPS gain on high end hardware. Gearbox’s own benchmark table shows an RTX 4080 test system going from 54.96 FPS to 78.43 FPS at 1440p Very High settings without upscaling. The minimum-spec configuration saw a jump from 37.32 to 52.79 FPS at 1080p Low. The recommended spec system moved from 44.89 to 56.54 FPS at 1440p High. Those translate to roughly 42.7%, 41.5%, and 26% gains, respectively. Gearbox rounds these to a headline claim of approximately 20% across the board in its official blog post, which is accurate as an average but undersells the high-end gains.
So where did those gains come from? Gearbox credits improvements across GPU, CPU, and general engine efficiency. The studio reworked how materials are pre-loaded for GPU driver detection on Borderlands 4’s notoriously weapons-heavy engine, improved Hierarchical Level of Detail rendering for distant areas, added Virtual Shadow Map caching to cut per-frame lighting recalculation costs from the day-night cycle, and cleaned up a laundry list of backend code that was unnecessarily hammering UI performance every frame. PSO compilation has also been refined to reduce the hitching that plagued the game’s first months.
Stability has also meaningfully improved. The overall crash rate is down from 0.63% of sessions at launch to 0.38%, and the share of players experiencing any crash has dropped from 17% to 9.35%. That’s still not great by absolute standards, but it’s movement in the right direction.
The v1.5 patch arrives today, March 26, and it’s not just a performance boost. It bundles the game’s first paid Story Pack, “Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned,” alongside a batch of gameplay changes including Photo Mode, a rework of Harlowe’s Zero-Point action skill, and UVHM adjustments. It’s a content update package that Borderlands 4 probably should have shipped with.
There are a couple of important caveats worth flagging. First, these are Gearbox’s own benchmarks, and independent testing will tell the full story when players actually get the update and start playing. Second, the upscaled performance numbers improved by a smaller margin than the native gains, which means if you’re already running DLSS or FSR quality mode the delta may feel less dramatic. Third, Gearbox explicitly says “we have more to do,” which, refreshingly, is a developer acknowledging the work is unfinished rather than declaring victory and walking away.