Gearbox Reveals Borderlands 3 Minimum and Recommended Spec Requirements

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(Image credit: 2K Games)

Gearbox has released the minimum and recommended specs for Borderlands 3. The company listed Intel CPU options and Nvidia GPU options but is highlighting AMD's hardware. That's not a surprise, considering that the developer has previously stated that Borderlands 3 was "developed from the ground up with AMD."

Luckily, the game's specs aren't incredibly intense, at least at 1080p. And many with last-gen graphics cards will still be able to hit the company's recommendations for 1440p.

Here's what the developer suggests:

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Row 0 - Cell 0 Minimum Specs (1080p)Recommended Specs (1440p)
CPUAMD FX-8350 / Intel Core i5-3570AMD Ryzen 5 2600 / Intel Core i7-4770
GPUAMD Radeon HD 7970 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 680AMD Radeon RX 590 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
RAM6GB16GB
Storage75GB HDD75GB HDD
OSWindows 7/8/10Windows 7/8/10

The company also revealed all of the graphics settings, including terrain and foliage detail, material quality, volumetric fog and more. You can see the full list of graphics options here.

The game releases on September 13 on PC (exclusively on the Epic Games Store), as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Correction: This post had incorrectly stated the game's release date. This has been corrected.

Andrew E. Freedman
Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Giroro
    75GB storage and 16GB RAM considering Borderlands 3 looks about the same as borderlands 2, which looked about the the same as Borderlands 1... which looked pretty good
    which r
    It just seems odd that paintbrush textures and flat colors which ran and looked great on a console with 512MB system memory and fit on an 8GB DVD now take as many resources as photorealism. I know it needs to run at 4k, but I mean, come on. That doesn't mean that every deliberately blurry paintbrush smear seen at a distance on a bad guy's shoulder needs to be saved at a resolution as big as your entire screen.
    So maybe this game is WAY bigger than the other 2, or poorly optimized for file size, or maybe the prettier lighting effects are somehow a storage-intensive RAM-hog?
    Reply
  • Anarkie13
    Giroro said:
    75GB storage and 16GB RAM considering Borderlands 3 looks about the same as borderlands 2, which looked about the the same as Borderlands 1... which looked pretty good
    which r
    It just seems odd that paintbrush textures and flat colors which ran and looked great on a console with 512MB system memory and fit on an 8GB DVD now take as many resources as photorealism. I know it needs to run at 4k, but I mean, come on. That doesn't mean that every deliberately blurry paintbrush smear seen at a distance on a bad guy's shoulder needs to be saved at a resolution as big as your entire screen.
    So maybe this game is WAY bigger than the other 2, or poorly optimized for file size, or maybe the prettier lighting effects are somehow a storage-intensive RAM-hog?

    From what I can see, they have increased the lighting and lighting effects. The paint style is still there, but there is far more detail and likely more frames of animation. So that will explain the graphics portion.

    The game is also said to be massively larger then the others at release, so that would account for the storage. I'm sure they also increased the physics, and other effects, which are resource hogs. Oh and they are using a new engine I'm sure too. They're tight with Epic, using the Unreal Engine in past releases if I recall. The newest engine is likely in play here too.

    2K has done a great job optimizing games in the past and the BL series is a great example. If they're putting up seemingly crazy specs, it likely has a good reason and we will most likely enjoy the result.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    Anarkie13 said:
    From what I can see, they have increased the lighting and lighting effects. The paint style is still there, but there is far more detail and likely more frames of animation. So that will explain the graphics portion.

    The game is also said to be massively larger then the others at release, so that would account for the storage. I'm sure they also increased the physics, and other effects, which are resource hogs. Oh and they are using a new engine I'm sure too. They're tight with Epic, using the Unreal Engine in past releases if I recall. The newest engine is likely in play here too.

    2K has done a great job optimizing games in the past and the BL series is a great example. If they're putting up seemingly crazy specs, it likely has a good reason and we will most likely enjoy the result.

    2K is a publisher, they don't do the optimization, the studios do. Gearbox specifically though.. I don't know, I guess we'll see, sometime after the 10 hours it will take your average data-capped American internet connection to download the thing.
    Reply