Member-only story
Borderlands 3 on The Switch is Surprisingly Good
I didn’t think that a Switch conversion of Borderlands 3 was technologically possible. When it first launched in 2018, it ran at a barely passable 30FPS on the PS4 and Xbox One and struggled to go much faster on the enhanced Pro and X consoles. It wasn’t until the 2020 launch of new machines that the game could finally run at 60FPS on consoles. At that speed, the game came to life, feeling like it finally had the performance oomph it needed to show off all its cool gameplay features.
The Switch isn’t quite as fast or powerful as the original Xbox One, although its Nvidia Tegra hardware does have a few extra tricks up its proverbial sleeve. Still, the typical route for Switch ports of heavy games like BL3 is to cap the framerate at 30 and cut visuals until you more or less hit your target. The wild and wonderful folks at Saber Interactive, famous for other “miracle” Switch ports like Doom and The Witcher 3, took a different route for this latest Borderlands port. They went for a full 60FPS on Nintendo’s portable machine and made dozens of changes in order to get there.
That’s right, the Nintendo Switch port of Borderlands 3 often runs at a full 60FPS. It gets closer to this mark more consistently in docked mode, but still maintains a relatively…
