Borderlands 3 has landed on the Epic Games store and so far reception from long-time fans has been fairly positive and most critics that understand the jovial nature of the game tend to agree. We haven't finished our game review yet so I can't link it yet, but we're here for the performance anyway. Borderlands 3 is powered by the Unreal 4 Engine and its lack of utilization of higher core counts shows that more than anything as you'll see shortly. On to the evaluation!

Testing Methodology

Testing Borderlands 3 was made a bit easier thanks to the built-in benchmark tool that is fairly representative of the actual gameplay performance while being able to keep results consistent between runs. While DirectX 12 is available in the game it is currently in a BETA state and I found its stability to be questionable at best, but capable of delivering slightly better performance when it wasn't crashing or stuttering, so because of that, we stuck to DirectX11 for our testing.

We used FrameView to capture the performance from the 105 second run of the benchmark while running at the Ultra preset. Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 99th percentile results from the run. I had been using 1% and .1% results but while working on an upcoming review, before starting this one, I had decided to move to a 99th percentile to represent the bottom end of the framerates for a simpler method of charting and reading for our readers. For those uncertain of what the 99th percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate. The representation of the 99th percentile is much more consistent in my experience than the 1% and .1% lows, so this was ultimately done as a way to deliver better metrics to the audience. Below is the setting that is applied with the Ultra preset.

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Test System