INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Borderlands 3 has finally arrived, and for all intents and purposes it's pretty good, at least according to our review
But, because this game will be played for a long time by people with all kinds of graphics cards, we thought it would be a good idea to get
a good idea of how it performs across the board on PC.Naturally, we tested Borderlands 3 performance on seven graphics cards, both at 1080p
Needless to say we don't feel the urge to start this game from the beginning any time soon.Anyway, after diving into some background
information about the PC version of the game, we'll break down performance, and give some recommendations about the best PC build for
the most popular entry in the series on PC, even if developer Gearbox made the unpopular decision to launch exclusively on the Epic Games
Store.It's not terribly hard to see why, as the PC version is generally pretty great
There are plenty of graphical settings you can mess around with to fine tune the image quality and performance of the game from Volumetric
Fog to AMD's FidelityFX Sharpening
Plus, thankfully, this game has a FoV slider, which should help anyone prone to motion sickness
multi-threading on Radeon graphics cards to boost performance
And, when paired with a Ryzen processor, Borderlands 3 optimizes the communication between the CPU and GPU for better performance and lower
odd resolution, cutting off a good portion of the scene
This included character names, and was generally an unpleasant experience.Keep in mind that Gearbox will likely fix these issues in an
upcoming patch, but these are issues to be aware of at the time of writing
Infogram; Future)Borderlands 3 PC performanceWhen it comes to raw numbers, Borderlands 3 seems to be extremely well optimized
Even the GTX 1660 Ti is able to hit an average of 50 frames per second (fps) at ultra settings
Turn those settings down to High and you'll likely be able to get 60 fps there, too.Test system specsCPU: 3.8Ghz AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12-core,
70MB cache, up to 4.6GHz)RAM: 16GB G.Skill TridentZ Royale DDR4 (3,000MHz) Motherboard: ASRock Taichi X570Power Supply: Corsair
RM850xStorage: 2TB Gigabyte Aorus M.2 SSD (NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4) Case: Corsair Crystal Series 570X RGBOperating system: Windows 10And, of
course, if you have an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti or 2080 Super, you can expect more than 100 fps at 1440p
Though, it is important to note that the game dipped to as low as 71.3 fps, even with the beastly RTX 2080 Ti, at this resolution
The game still felt incredibly smooth regardless of the hardware, though.At 1080p, though, every card in our testing lineup absolutely chews
If you have a high frame-rate 1080p gaming monitor, you should be able to break 120 fps with the RTX 2070 Super and higher
Plus, with an average of 99 fps, both the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and RTX 2060 Super both qualify as high-frame-rate gaming here
And, while the GTX 1660 Ti is at the bottom of the pile, an average fps of 77 with a minimum of 62.9 is nothing to scoff at.Note the Nvidia
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 Super performance at 1080p, though - they're virtually identical
Even with the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, the RTX 2080 Ti was bottlenecked at this resolution, proving once again that you shouldn't drop more than a
grand on a graphics card if you have a 1080p screen.AMD graphics cards work wonders here.(Image credit: Future)The best PC for Borderlands
3So, all these numbers are cool and all, but what is the best PC hardware for Borderlands 3?Well, right off the bat, we'll go ahead and list
Radeon RX 590 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GBStorage: 75GBAnd, based on our experiences testing Borderlands 3 PC performance, these
recommended system specs check out
We noticed up to 12GB of system memory being used, so we would actually recommend 16GB of RAM.Plus, despite the game being optimized for AMD
hardware, we didn't notice the game chewing through our CPU too much, only ever pinning 2-4 cores
So, the Ryzen 5 2600 is actually an excellent choice, though an Intel Core i5 processor should be more than enough to handle this game
We don't know why Gearbox is pushing the Intel Core i7-4770.At the end of the day, even if you're rocking an older system, you should have
no problem running Borderlands 3, especially if you're willing to turn some settings down
If you don't have 16GB of RAM, you might run into some stuttering, but as long as you have the minimum 8GB, you should have a good enough
experience.If you're looking to build a PC to play Borderlands 3, we went ahead and gathered up the best PC components for the game down
below, using our exclusive price comparison system to find you the best deals on each part
