Borderlands 3 Was Ahead of Its Time

Remember this generation’s 120FPS promises?

PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

When Gearbox first launched Borderlands 3 back in 2019 on the last generation of consoles, performance was a bit of a mess. If you were fortunate enough to have a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X, you could enable a mode that tried to hit 60FPS, but either way there was the sense that the existing consoles couldn’t quite deliver on the ambitions of the game.

The PC version was quite scalable to much more powerful hardware, completely eating up GPU resources and leading AMD to weirdly boast that it could run at peaks above 100FPS on their highest-end video cards…but only if you turned on their at-the-time new “Radeon Boost” feature to lower the resolution dynamically.

A year brought many changes to the game, and the launch of new hardware in 2020 enabled true next gen console versions that finally delivered on speed. If you’ve got an Xbox Series X or PS5, you can play the game at 120FPS in the performance mode as long as you don’t mind a 1080P resolution. Otherwise, you get 4K60. This sort of performance flexibility was a core part of the marketing for both of these machines, even if it didn’t come to fruition in most cases. 120 FPS for consoles is an ambitious target that’s mostly only seen in ported last generation software that finally has the power it needs now, and…