Randy Pitchford’s Borderlands 4 Performance Workarounds Aren’t All Helpful

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has been personally offering tech support to aggrieved Borderlands 4 players, but some of the advice is only adding fuel to the fire. The latest installment in the looter shooter series is generally considered better than Borderlands 3, but beyond the game's actual content, its reputation is being affected by myriad performance issues.

Taking to social media, Pitchford has been attempting to smooth things over himself, but one particular tweet is only drawing more ire: "The game is the game," Pitchford wrote, "Please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy with it." A particular point of contention has been over low frame rates on PC, with some players peeved that Borderlands 4 relies heavily on frame generation to reach desired benchmarks. "I'm sorry you don't like being told to use DLSS, but that is the way," begins Pitchford's rebuttal. "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."

Some Helpful, Some Not

Another common problem is memory leakage. Borderlands 4 performs worse the longer you play, or the longer the game client is running. For PlayStation 5 Pro specifically, Pitchford offers a rather simple workaround: "Quit game and restart." Memory leaks are reportedly affecting every platform, and restarting the game may help on PC and Xbox as well. But general performance issues (especially on PC) are getting Pitchford in hot water.

To Pitchford's credit, he's genuinely trying to help (in most instances), and Twitter is not the most level-headed forum for discussion. Threads of significant length revolve around Borderlands 4's performance on high-end hardware, like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card. Pitchford continually suggests enabling DLSS, while players argue a 5080 shouldn't require frame gen to reach acceptable frame rates, thus suggesting there's a problem with Borderlands 4's optimization itself.

Borderlands 4 Performance Issues Continue To Affect User Reviews

Pitchford's Denial Isn't Helping

Borderlands 4 Timekeeper in shadows looking at something in his hand

Some of the frustration from console players certainly comes from Gearbox's decision to only allow reviews of Borderlands 4 on PC, but even that platform is suffering, as evidenced above. At the time of writing, Borderlands 4 only has 65% positive reviews on Steam, with many of them pointing toward poor optimization. One of the positive reviews succinctly captures the full breadth of the saga: "Incredibly good game. Someone please muzzle Randy Pitchford, and start optimizing the game ASAP please."

Borderlands 4's user score on Metacritic is a similarly dire 4.6. Buggy, poorly optimized game launches are, unfortunately, not out of the ordinary – Borderlands 4 has the opportunity to recover. Pitchford has long been an incendiary figure in the gaming industry, largely because he's demonstrably outspoken about his products. Now that it's out, Borderlands 4 performance will likely get better, but it may take some time.

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OpenCritic Reviews: Top Critic Avg: 82/100 Critics Rec: 87%

Released: September 12, 2025
ESRB: Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
Developer(s): Gearbox Software
Publisher(s): 2K
Engine: Unreal Engine 5