Borderlands 3: what's up with console frame-rates?

How well does Borderlands 3 perform on the current generation consoles? Digital Foundry coverage of the new Gearbox hit will be somewhat staggered since 2K failed to provide review code, but we do now have some idea of what the developer targeted and delivered on the enhanced consoles – Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. The initial verdict? There are some puzzling technical decisions in place and clear performance issues that need work, but gameplay is golden.

What is interesting about the Pro and X releases is where there is parity and where there is not. Gearbox sets out with the best of intentions here, offering users of both machines the chance to choose between resolution and performance in the settings menu. In terms of pixel counts at least, Pro and X are a match: the resolution mode aims to maximise the return from 4K displays, offering up a 3200×1800 presentation, which looks good owing to Unreal Engine 4’s anti-aliasing – not to mention the core art style. Frame-rate is capped at 30fps here, in contrast to the performance mode, which aims to deliver 60fps and does so by dropping internal resolution down to 1080p on both machines.

Curiously though, there are some differences in the visual feature set and remarkably, PlayStation 4 Pro delivers a slightly richer experience. Side by side with Xbox One X, it’s clear that it’s the Pro that offers improved anisotropic filtering on ground textures – and it’s also apparent that aspects like foliage density are a cut above on the Pro. It’s a surprising set-up but the working theory we have for now (backed up by some other multi-platform releases we’ve seen) is that aspects of the base Xbox One version persist into the X version – we’ll check this out in our follow-up on how Borderlands 3 runs on the vanilla consoles.

It’s performance that is the real issue here, however. With two consoles each offering two different modes of play, there are four potential iterations of Borderlands 3 to consider. And to tell the truth, there’s only one of them that we’re comfortable playing for anything length of time – Xbox One X in resolution mode. This delivers a nigh-on locked, evenly frame-paced 30 frames per second, paired with very nice 1800p image quality.

Usually, we’d opt to give up some resolution and target 60 frames per second instead but the truth is that Borderlands 3’s performance mode has some genuine issues. On Xbox One X, it’s only traversal across the environments that genuinely locked to the target frame-rate. Combat sees performance tumble into the 50s, punctuated by longer frame-time stutters that add further inconsistency into the experience. If I had to guess, I’d say that Borderlands 3 pushes CPU just a little too hard here for the X to cope with adequately. The situation gets worse when battling in a vehicle, with drops down into the 40s.