'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

I don’t follow. Borderlands is on all consoles too isn’t it? At least the older ones are?

Seems to run fine on console.

It depends on the game. Could a Sonic game be fun in open world? Yes, and it was. Would The Hunt? Or Supermeat Boy? Probably not. I’m just pointing out you can still design for your movement abilities in an open world.

For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It’s stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don’t really get anything from being open world. I’d rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.

I’ll say it here again, i have an 7900xtx i expect it to run silky smooth.

If it doesn’t, that’s on you brother.

I also play on 1440p and it doesn’t reach a well enough framerate at ultra settings, i set it on high and adjusted some things to lower settings to get a better framerate.

The problem is Randy.

You can divide stuff up into memory however you want, into objects, arrays, whatever. Generally speaking the GPU memory is used for things which will run fast in the streaming processors of the GPU. They are small processors specialized for a limited set of tasks that involve 3D rendering. The types of thing you would have in GPU memory are textures, models, shader scripts, various buffers created to store data for rendering passes like lighting and shadow, zbuffers, and the frame buffer and stuff.

Other things are kept in the ram and are used by the CPU which has many instruction sets and many optimizations for different types of tasks. CPUs are really good at running unpredictable code. They have very large and complex cores which do all kinds of things like branch prediction( taking several paths through code ahead of time when there is free time available) it has direct access to the PCI bus and access things like the south and north bridge, storage controller, io devices, etc.

Generally on a game engine most of the actual logic is happening on the CPU because this is very complex and arbitrary code that is calculation heavy. Things like the level data, AI, collisions, physics, streaming data and stuff is handled by the CPU. The CPU prepares frames by batching many things into one call to the GPU. This is because the GPU is good at taking a command from the CPU and performing that task many times simultaneously. Things like pixels for example. If the CPU had to send every instruction to the GPU in sequence it would be very slow. This is because of the physical distance between the GPU and CPU and also just that a script would only do one thing at a time in a loop. Shaders are different. They are like running a function across a large data set utilizing the 1000 + cores in an average modern GPU.

There are other differences as well. The CPU has access to low latency memory where the GPU prefers higher latency but high bandwidth memory. This is because the types of operations the GPU is doing are much more predictable and consistent. CPUs are very arbitrary and often the CPU might end up taking a path that is unusual so the memory it has to access might be scattered and arbitrary.

So basically most of the game engine and game logic runs in memory because it’s essentially a sequential program that is very linear and arbitrary and because the CPU has many tools in its tool boxes for different tasks, like AVX, SSE, and stuff like this. Most of the visual stuff like 3D transformation and shading and sampling take place on the GPU because its high bandwidth and highly parallel yet with some cores, yet you have many of them that can operate independently.

Ram is very useful but is always limited by console tech. It is particularly important in more interactive and sandboxy type games. Stuff like voxels. It also comes in handy when running sim or rts games. Engines are usually designed around console specs so they can release on those platforms. It can be used for anything even rendering, but it is extremely slow compared to GPU memory in actual bandwidth, which is usually less then an inch away from the actual GPU and has a large bus interface, something like 128-512 bit. This is how many physical wires connect the memory chip to the GPU. It limits how much data you can send in one chunk or cycle. With a 64 bit interface you can only send one 64 bit word at a time. Many processes can pack 4 of those into a 256 word and send them at once getting a 4x speed increase on a 256 bit bus, or 8x speed on a 512 bit bus.

So you have higher bandwidth, high latency memory on a wide bus which feeds a very predictable set of many simple processors. Usually when you want to load memory into the GPU you have to prepare it with the CPU and send it over the PCI bus. This is far too slow to actually use system ram to augment the GPU ram. It’s slow in latency and ram, so if you were to do so, your GPU will be sitting idle like 80% of the time waiting on packets, and then it will only get a 64 or 128 bit packet from the ram, not to mention the CPU overhead of constantly managing the memory in real time.

Having high ram requirements wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world because it’s cheap and can really help some types of games which have large and complex worlds with lots of physics and things happening. Ram is cheap. Not optimizing for GPUs is pretty bad especially with prices these days. That will not happen much because games tend to be written in languages like C++ which manage memory in a very low level way, so they tend to just take about as much as they need. One of the biggest reasons you use a language like C++ to write game engines is because you can decide how and when to allocate and free memory. This prevents stuttering. If the system is handling memory you tend to get a good deal of stuttering because the CPU will get loaded for half a sec here and there as the garbage collector tries to free 2 GBs of memory or something. This tends to make games engines very structured when it comes to the amount of memory they use. Since they are mostly trying to reuse code as much as possible, and are targeting consoles, they usually just aim for the amount of ram they know they will have on consoles. Things like extra draw distance on PCs and stuff can use more memory.

LODs can be generated in real time but this is slow. You can do nearly anything with code. It’s just if it’s a good fit for your application. In a game engine every cycle is precious. You are updating the entire scene, moving all your data, preparing a frame, resolving all interactions, running scripts, and everything else in just over 16 ms for 60 fps. The amount of data your PC in processing in just 16 ms will blow your mind. Usually 3-12 passes in the renderer. A very simple engine will draw a zbuffer, where during this 16 ms it determines the distance to the closest object behind every pixel, then using this data to figure out what needs to actually be drawn. Then it’s taking these objects and resolving the normals, basically figuring out if the polygon is facing towards or away from the player. This is cutting out rendering the vast majority of polygons. Then the lighting data and everything is combined with this and sent to the GPU which actually goes through a list of polygons need to be drawn, and then looking up the points to draw the polygons. It’s also casting rays from a light source and shading the scene. This is very simple, basically a quake or doom like game. Modern games are much more complex. They draw each frame many times with many different buffers Generating different data and using it for the next pass. Generating LODs is just something that isn’t done unless needed for some reason, like dynamic terrain or voxel terrain. In a game that is mostly static geometry there is not really any reason to give up that compute time when you can just pregen them. Generating LODs in real time is quite a process. You have to load a region into memory, reduce it’s polygon, downsize the texture. Generate a new mesh and texture, and place it in the world. This would be a back and forth between the GPU and CPU. Some games do it however. 7dtd, space engineers, Minecraft with a distant terrain mod, and I’m sure many others generate LODs on another thread, but these are usually fairly low quality meshes.

What’s with this “you” middle man? Let’s just get rid of that and have shareholders-robots.

At what resolution, frame rate, and settings? Trying to get a good grasp of the performance if I ever buy it.

So thats why it runs like shit.

Sounds like it works on your machine. What’s your point?

I’m an ok gamer, maybe even good, but premium? I don’t know… I guess this game isn’t for me. Better spend my money on other games then.

I’m waiting for it to become “free”, no idea how long that’ll take though.

Premium gamer spotted

5120x1440p
60-80fps

I followed this guide from gearbox for the settings, except I turned off volumetric cloud shadows and turned up DLSS to Quality

the fact, that steam reviews were on mostly negative on launch day, and it suddenly got mostly positive means steam has once again tempered with the statistics. fuck valve as well.

I will agree theres a lot more. Theres just a lot more games in general. Pick up the Solium Infernum remake, or Windblown, or Wizard of Legend, or even Helldivers 2 isnt open world. Plenty to choose from. But I do emplore you to play Sonic Frontiers. Shit was dope. Also Sword of the Sea just came out, another fine addition to the atmospheric collection. Theres just a lot more now. So you’re gonna see a lot more and you’re gonna see a lot more terrible games.

It’s not even just about the games being terrible. The ballooning costs is just unsustainable. It’s the reason we’ve seen so many layoffs, and it sucks. It’s just mismanagement. The executives are the ones telling the developers to make open world games, for the most part. They don’t understand how that effects the rest of the design, or how much it ends up costing. They just see a trend and tell the studios they need to follow it.

If it was just that we got some shitty games I wouldn’t care. However, it’s effecting people’s lives. We need a more sustainable industry of smaller budget games that know what they are and plays to its strengths. We’ve got too many games trying to be everything games. It’s the reason studios ramped up the price to $70, and then, quickly after, $80. Soon they’ll be Charing $90-$100 because they let costs get too high to maintain.

is there that much difference between 2015 and 2025 hardware? (like now people are saying moore’s law is dead and stuff)

Nice. Thanks for the info. I’ll probably grab it in 3 years lol