Randy Pitchford goes to war against PC gamers following Borderlands 4 criticism

Borderlands 4 launched late last week and after a full weekend with the game, PC players have come away with the impression that the game was not very well optimised. This has led to a mixed overall score for the game on Steam and now, Randy Pitchford is tweeting out his many frustrations with PC gamers.

Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox, has been known for his social media rants. He has put together one for the record books this morning as he proclaims that Borderlands 4 is actually ‘very optimal' and blames PC gamers for expecting too much from their hardware.

“Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing”, Pitchford's thread begins. “We have made an amazing and fun and huge looter shooter campaign game. The game is pretty damn optimal – which means that the software is doing what we want without wasteful cycles on bad processes.”

Pitchford moves on to point out that Borderlands 4 has a bunch of features that will allow PC gamers to balance their frame rate and resolution. He then goes on to say: “For a campaign shooter looter, it is absolutely reasonable for developers to focus on default settings achieving 30fps on minimum specification and 60fps on recommended specification.”

“It is a mistake to believe or expect that PCs between minimum specification and recommended specification can achieve all of extremely high frame rate, maximum/ultra features, and extremely high resolution.”

One common complaint amongst the negative Steam reviews is the need for DLSS to achieve 60FPS+ frame rates, even on high-end hardware like an RTX 5080. While it is true that DLSS is a great performance tool, when we are dealing with £1000+ graphics cards, we tend to expect native 4K performance to be high, with DLSS providing the bump to get to ultra-high frame rates. As pointed out by wccftech, an RTX 5090 can't run the game at native 4K/60FPS – and that is a £2000+ graphics card.

While Pitchford's latest rant may be ill advised, there is a good chance that some of the performance issues in Borderlands 4 are not Gearbox's fault. Unreal Engine 5 is known to be a heavy engine that causes common performance issues across a range of titles, especially games with large open world areas. Rather than blaming the gamers for not being satisfied with sub 60FPS on hardware that costs thousands of dollars, perhaps the focus should really be on Epic Games and the fact that they've allowed a number of issues to persist for years.

A number of performance problems with Unreal Engine 5 are due to be fixed with the new 5.6 version of the engine, which includes new performance optimisations developed by CD Projekt Red for use in The Witcher 4. However, it is going to be years before we see these tools in practise, in shipped games. By that time, Epic Games will likely be gearing up the marketing for Unreal Engine 6.

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KitGuru Says: Have you tried Borderlands 4 since it launched last week? How is the game running for you?

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