Gearbox CEO channels inner Claptrap, offers himself up as personal tech support over rampant Borderlands 4 PC performance issues — 'Would you like help tuning with your personal specification?'
That's one way to solve the issue...
In the weekend and change since its launch, Borderlands 4 has quickly become notorious as a PC resource hog the likes of which we have never seen before. Now, after days of personally crusading against complaints of poor optimization and performance issues, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has taken to offering personal tech support to players struggling for performance.
After early reports at the weekend that Borderlands 4 was crushing even the most powerful PCs — the 5090 can't manage native 60fps in some scenarios — publisher 2K put out an extensive list of recommended graphics settings for a variety of resolutions on both AMD and Nvidia cards.
Pitchford's own contribution has been decidedly more controversial. "Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing," he posted on Monday in an X post, which received so much backlash that it got a community note.
Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing.September 15, 2025
In his less philosophical tweets, Pitchford has insisted that many of the Borderlands 4 players experiencing performance issues are simply demanding too much of their hardware, and that many would benefit from turning down the resolution or dialling up frame generation tech like DLSS. However, that hasn't stopped him from moving to offering personal tech support to people struggling.
"Would you like help tuning with your personal specification?," he asked one user with an RTX 5080 in a tone that will be all too familiar to fans of the franchise. "You should be in good shape," he replied. "Run on that 1440p monitor. Recommend two inputs into that G8 so you're running it split screen. What FPS are you getting? Vsync off. Disable anti-aliasing. Use DLSS. Multi-frame generation at 4x. nVIDIA Reflex: On. Match your frame rate limiter to your monitor's refresh rate. You can set everything to very high (but you can gain some more frames if you turn down or off the volumetric fog). Let me know what FPS you get with those settings."
"At 1440p you should be blazing fast," he continued. Pitchford has responded to plenty of comments about the game's poor performance and optimization with offers of personal tech support, not all of them landing well. "You are being unbelievably insufferable, Randy," one user retorted to his offer. "I'm trying to be helpful," the beleaguered CEO replied, before asking: "What do you think would be helpful? What would you have me do?"
Pitchford's messaging is certainly more than a little mixed and likely not helping the reception to the game. On the one hand, he has insisted the game is built well and that users are demanding too much of their hardware. On the other hand, Gearbox has pushed out a couple of PC performance patches, and the CEO says they are continuing work behind the scenes. Fans of the tenured looter shooter would be remiss not to admit that there's more than a little hint of the desperation that made its one-wheeled protagonist Claptrap an infamous mainstay of the series in his posts.
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Borderlands 4 is the latest installment in Gearbox's popular looter shooter franchise, and in many ways is a hefty departure from previous games. It eschews the setting of homeworld Pandora for the first time, pitting players into a fight for liberation from the Timekeeper, the overlord of the planet Kairos.
Performance issues aside, fans can expect a return of many of Borderlands' most popular mechanics, including randomly generated loot, humorous dialogue, and prolific violence.
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Stephen is Tom's Hardware's News Editor with almost a decade of industry experience covering technology, having worked at TechRadar, iMore, and even Apple over the years. He has covered the world of consumer tech from nearly every angle, including supply chain rumors, patents, and litigation, and more. When he's not at work, he loves reading about history and playing video games.
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Marlin1975 I'll wait for this to hit the $5 or less summer sale. Hopefully by then the bugs/code issues will be fixed by then.Reply -
bigdragon Every AAA game for the past decade has had major performance and quality issues at launch. I don't understand why people keep preordering and clamoring to play on day-one. Every AAA game needs at least 3 months after its launch to become comfortably playable. People need to grow longer memories and stop rewarding the behavior of AAA....and AAAA (looking at you, Ubisoft).Reply -
hotaru251 Reply
it won't.Marlin1975 said:I'll wait for this to hit the $5 or less summer sale. Hopefully by then the bugs/code issues will be fixed by then.
its a modern UE5 game.
The engine itself is awful and why these games using it now have such high demands while visually shouldnt be NEAR as demanding as they are.
UE5 is "ez" but its also poorly optimized -
ThisIsMe “…but but Roblox runs just fine!”Reply
This is what happens when the masses try to be PC gamers. It’ll only get worse. It’s either “this doesn’t look any better than the last one” or “this is to demanding for my prebuilt that I got based on a recommendation from my middle schooler child’s nerdy friend” -
King_V So, the guy responsible for sending the Borderlands franchise hurtling downhill things he's going to be able to personally offer support?Reply -
atomicWAR Pitchford has been unhinged in all of this. He needs to shut his mouth more. If he was going to make any argument it should have been this was the start of next gen PC gaming seeing as next gen consoles are a couple years out and PC is always leading the march. Then his argument for Bad Ass settings could have been something like, "Oh you'll need to wait for RTX 6000/RX10000 (or what ever they are called) to really max Borderlands 4 out". It would been mostly bunk but it would be better than mocking his own fan base.Reply -
UnforcedERROR Reply
As I mentioned in another article: Pitchford's always been like this. This is not the first, nor the last, we'll hear of him making ridiculous comments. It's more aggravating to me that the track record has been so consistently bad and yet people never seem to remember him behaving this way.King_V said:So, the guy responsible for sending the Borderlands franchise hurtling downhill things he's going to be able to personally offer support?
This is the same guy who was behind Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens Colonial Marines. Borderlands is the one big series Gearbox have been successful with, regardless of his antics. I doubt that'll stop here. -
Jabberwocky79 Reply
But I appreciate them doing it.... that way the bugs get found sooner and when I buy the game for 5 bucks on a Steam sale I don't have to worry about it :sneaky:bigdragon said:Every AAA game for the past decade has had major performance and quality issues at launch. I don't understand why people keep preordering and clamoring to play on day-one. Every AAA game needs at least 3 months after its launch to become comfortably playable. People need to grow longer memories and stop rewarding the behavior of AAA....and AAAA (looking at you, Ubisoft). -
m1ndset You guys do realize that he's pulling a "trump" on the gaming media? He says outrageous garbage, website like this post about it, people hate engage, the game gets free press. It might not be intentional but apparently it works every time.Reply -
aberkae These CEOs Sweeney included should just tattoo the Nvidia logo on their forehead. 😅Reply
What clown show!
No, he is getting negative press which will indirectly affect sales on a game that just launched. His take just refund the game instead of calming the angry customers via we will do better we willbuse significant resources on patching the game, but no he had to mouth off and make a clown of himself. What's his slogan make Nvidia 4 trillion dollar company or make Nvidia rich again?m1ndset said:You guys do realize that he's pulling a "trump" on the gaming media? He says outrageous garbage, website like this post about it, people hate engage, the game gets free press. It might not be intentional but apparently it works every time.
Update enthusiast are not supporting this shyte show either!