Jolly Cooperation: Optimizing Borderlands 3

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tiro Finale! In the last entry of Jolly Cooperation, I revealed that the latest cooperative game that I was playing was, Borderlands 3. By the time the first chapter was written, I had already put a dozen hours or so into the game. But getting the game up and running was not all smooth sailing as, my first few launches were marred with issues.

Part of that issue came from the graphics API where my system simply did not want to play nice with Borderlands 3 on DX12. Only upon defaulting to DX11 (after several force quits), did the game start running fairly well. Not wanting to delay my party members, I allowed the game to run at its default graphics settings (Medium), locked the frame rate to 75 fps and did not have any issues throughout. When I finally got the time to tinker with the settings, that was when I was able to get the most out of the game's visual settings while still maintaining a high, stable frame rate.

Before we dive into the numbers, I should state the system that I am using is a PC composed of largely mid-range parts. These include a Ryzen 5 3600X, Radeon RX 5600XT, 16GB of RAM and the game installed on an NVME SSD. All of this is paired to a 1080p FreeSync 75Hz display. With the help of the in-game benchmark, I was able to get a very good idea of how each setting would affect the game in both best and worst case scenarios. Starting at the Very Low preset, the game put out a nice 125 fps but, that is clearly not what we are aiming for.

Pushing up the preset to Low saw the frame rate drop to a still extremely playable 119 frame per second. With just a 5% differential between Very Low and Low, I would strongly recommend players stay away from the Very Low preset unless frame rate is absolutely required as there is a significant drop in visual quality between the two. 

Moving to the Medium preset, the frame rate dropped by another 13 frames to 106 frames per second or roughly an 11% differential. The biggest difference I was between Medium and Low graphics presets came down to draw distance, shadow quality and texture streaming speeds. Personally for many, I believe the Medium preset strikes a very happy balance in terms of visual quality and performance. 
 

Seeing as there was a lot of headroom to play with, I decided to jump all the way to Ultra settings. The final result was an average frame rate of 75 frames per second. This was a really big dip in performance compared to the Medium preset and while it remained at my frame rate goal of 75 frames per second, I noticed considerable dips in performance throughout the benchmark going as low at the high 50s.

Knowing that my sweet spot would lie in between the High-Ultra graphics presets, I set about optimizing the High graphics preset first. Using Eurogamer/Digital Foundry's very helpful Borderlands 3 guide, I was able to quickly identify several key graphical settings which were real resource hogs.

These settings included, Material Complexity, Shadows, Volumetric Fog and Screen Space Reflections. All of which I set to Medium and saw little to no change in the visual presentation of the game. 

Yet when I ran the benchmarks, there was indeed a significant increase in performance. The final outcome of the first run of optimizations was 92.5 frames per second. Throughout the benchmark, the game never once dipped below the 70 frames per second mark either. 

Feeling ambitious, I decided to turn up all the remaining settings up to Ultra just to see how things would work. The only setting I left off were Motion Blur settings as I am generally not a fan of motion blur in video games. Especially first person shooters where I make a lot of quick flicking movements.

Ambient Occlusion was also left on High as, an earlier test I did yielded no visual difference between High and Ultra. This was partly due to Borderlands' art style where ambient occlusion just does not quite stand out as it would with other photo realistic type games. 

With all of the settings dialed up to Ultra (save the few I specifically kept at Medium), the benchmark put out a respectable 86 frames per second. Low points in the benchmark saw the game running in the mid 60s which would still technically be acceptable given the fact I was using a FreeSync display. 
 

In a decision to both, not tax my system too much and to get the smoothest frame pacing possible, I opted to drop most of the Ultra settings back to High with the exception of Anisotropic Filtering (kept at 16x) and Character Details (kept at Ultra). 

To be fair, I did not notice any perceivable difference in terms of visual quality between High and Ultra. Moreover, I felt like the settings I had dialed in struck a perfect balance between high frame rate multiplayer compatibility and great screenshot results. 

Was I correct in my assumption? With a 93 frames per second average and the game just hitting 70 frames per second for a very small portion of the benchmark, I was very happy with the final results. I followed that up with two 3 hour long sessions which ran smoothly. In fact, I am rather impressed by all this new draw distance that I am now getting.

I have yet to run around in Photo Mode to take new screenshots of Ultra quality Character Details but, that is one thing I am certainly looking forward to. With that, we come to the end of this rather lengthy but, hopefully, informative chapter of Jolly Cooperation. Join us next time where we return to our regularly scheduled mayhem. Until then, thank you so much for reading and have yourself a wonderful day ahead!