While Borderlands as a franchise is an acknowledged best seller on consoles, the series plays best on PC thanks in no small part to the keyboard/mouse interface and higher framer-rates. Historically, it’s also been relatively easy to run on PC too – but there is the sense that Borderlands 3 isn’t quite so optimal. Regardless, Gearbox has shipped the game with a raft of graphical settings to play with, along with support for both DX11 and DX12 APIs. Can you run at 1080p at 60 frames per second on a mid-range PC? With some judicious settings tweaks it is possible – and you won’t be losing much in the way of visual fidelity either.
Going into the game, the first big decision to make from a settings perspective is whether to run under DX11 or the experimental DX12 option. After running some benchmarks, we found plus and minus points for each API. Generally speaking, if you are not CPU-constrained, DX11 can provide faster results than DX12 – so in our mid-range test rig using a Core i5 8400 with GTX 1060, graphics are our primary bottleneck, meaning that DX11 is the best choice. However, if you’re opting to run the game at high frame-rates, DX12 is the better option when you’re CPU-constrained instead.
For our tests then, DX11 it is. We found that running with the older API delivered performance at least on par with DX12, but often ran up to seven per cent faster in like-for-like scenarios. We should expect Gearbox to improve performance over time with DX12 as the feature moves out of beta, but in the here and now we would expect the older API to be the better fit for most PC gamers.
The next most important preset is – perhaps predictably – resolution. For a GPU like the GTX 1060, full HD is the best fit for its capabilities, but straight out of the box at the fully maxed ‘badass’ settings, a 40fps turn-out isn’t likely to impress. Borderlands 3 does feature an internal resolution slider, but for some reason, it’s not exactly granular – adjusting the slider downwards from 100 per cent takes you to 75 per cent, or 1440×810. We’d hope to see the slider improved in a future patch, but thankfully .ini tweaks can shift this variable to where you would want it. 83 per cent would correlate to 900p, while 90 per cent would deliver 1728×972.
However, using the internal resolution scaler or dropping resolution across the board with the display option should only be used as a last resort – the fact is that you don’t ultra or indeed badass settings and there are some key performance wins by adjusting select presets to medium, with very little loss in noticeable image quality.