Borderlands 4: Best PC Settings After Version 1.10

Borderlands 4's Version 1.10 update landed free for every player alongside the paid Loveless the Hacker, Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort, and Bounty Pack 5. The headline change is a level cap raised from 60 to 70, which means more skill points, more build experimentation, and more time spent on Kairos than ever. Before you sink into a fresh build, it's worth spending ten minutes getting your PC settings right, because Gearbox has spent the last several months rebuilding how this game performs.

01What Version 1.10 Actually Changes For You

Outside of the ten extra levels, Version 1.10 brings class buffs and balance adjustments across every base-game Vault Hunter, including a notable damage increase for Rafa the Exo-Soldier's APOPHIS Lance. None of that requires a settings change on its own, but a higher level cap means longer sessions in denser fights, chaining Action Skills and elemental effects back to back. That's exactly the kind of sustained load where a shaky settings profile turns into visible stutter, so it's the right moment to revisit your Visuals menu rather than just pushing through it.

02Start With Auto-Detect, Then Layer In the NVIDIA App

Gearbox's own PC Optimization Guide lays out a specific order of operations, and it's worth following exactly. Boot into Borderlands 4, open the Options menu, and go to the Visuals tab. Inside the Advanced tab under General, click Run Auto-Detect Graphics Preset — this reads your hardware and applies a baseline preset built for it, rather than defaulting everyone to the same settings.

If you're on an NVIDIA card, don't stop there. Install the NVIDIA App, grab the latest GeForce Game Ready Driver from its Drivers panel, then switch to the Graphics tab, find Borderlands 4 in your Programs library, and hit Optimize. The app scans your specific GPU and applies NVIDIA's own recommended settings for your chosen upscaled resolution — 1080p, 1440p, or 4K. Gearbox notes this guide is currently NVIDIA-specific; AMD and Intel Arc owners should reference the AMD Optimization Guide published at launch instead, since the automated profiles don't yet cover those cards the same way.

03The Fastest Settings to Drop First

If you've run Auto-Detect and the NVIDIA App's Optimize scan and you're still chasing frames, Gearbox's guide names three specific settings to lower before touching anything else: Shadow Quality, Lighting Quality, and Volumetric Cloud / Volumetric Cloud Shadows. These three interact with each other constantly on Kairos, where the game runs a full day-night cycle and recalculates lighting every frame, so trimming them tends to buy back more frame rate than dropping texture or effects quality does.

Work through them one at a time rather than slamming everything to Low. Drop Shadow Quality a notch, check how the game feels in a busy fight, then move to Lighting Quality, and only touch the volumetric cloud settings last since they mostly affect open-sky areas rather than the interiors and canyons where most fights happen.

How to Set Up Borderlands 4 After Version 1.10

1. 1Open Options, go to Visuals, then the Advanced tab under General and click Run Auto-Detect Graphics Preset to get a hardware-matched baseline.2 min
2. 2Install the NVIDIA App (or your AMD/Intel driver suite) and grab the latest Game Ready or equivalent driver before tuning anything further.5 min
3. 3On NVIDIA cards, open the NVIDIA App's Graphics tab, find Borderlands 4, and use Optimize to apply NVIDIA's per-GPU recommended settings at your chosen upscaled resolution.1 min
4. 4If you're still short on frames, lower Shadow Quality one notch at a time and check how it feels in a busy fight before going further.1 min
5. 5Move to Lighting Quality once Shadow Quality is set — Kairos's dynamic day-night cycle makes this one of the heavier settings on your GPU.1 min
6. 6Reduce Volumetric Cloud and Volumetric Cloud Shadows only after the first two, since they mainly affect open-sky areas rather than interiors and canyons.1 min
7. 7Leave your chosen upscaler on and matched to your target resolution rather than forcing native res — Gearbox's recommended settings are built around it.1 min
8. 8Check your GPU's VRAM against Gearbox's 8GB minimum / higher recommended figures, and make sure the game is installed on an SSD to avoid streaming stutter.2 min

04Don't Turn Upscaling Off

It's tempting to disable upscaling and run native resolution once you've got a capable GPU, but that runs against how Gearbox has actually built its recommended settings. The entire NVIDIA App optimization flow is built around picking an upscaled target resolution first, then tuning everything else to hit a steady frame rate at that target — not the other way around. Leaving upscaling engaged and matching the recommended settings for your specific card is the path Gearbox tested against, and it's the one most likely to avoid the frame-time spikes that make a stutter-prone area feel worse than it is.

05Where the Stutter Actually Comes From

Since launch, Gearbox's optimization team has focused heavily on Shader Pipeline State Objects, or PSOs — the step where your graphics driver compiles a final shader for your specific GPU the first time it encounters a new effect. Borderlands 4 generates enormous numbers of unique weapon and material combinations, which used to mean hitching every time you picked up an unfamiliar gun or walked into a new area. Gearbox says it now pre-builds more of these shaders ahead of time and compiles others in the background, and paired with a reworked Hierarchical Level of Detail system for distant geometry, that work has contributed to roughly a 20% average FPS gain since launch across both minimum and recommended specs.

Gearbox has also detailed exactly where the remaining GPU and CPU headroom came from, and it's useful context for anyone still hand-tuning individual sliders. On the GPU side, the team trimmed polygon counts on effects like thruster exhaust trails, Action Skill particle effects, and Airship drop world events — the kind of high-frequency visual noise that spikes during big fights but that most players never consciously register. On the CPU side, Cryo damage effects, collision physics, and cloth simulation were all refined to reduce per-frame overhead. None of these are exposed as individual sliders you can toggle, but they explain why a level 70 build slinging elemental damage and grenades in a crowd runs noticeably better today than it did at launch, even on identical settings.

Gearbox DevCast: Borderlands 4 PC Performance Check-In, posted March 23, 2026 — the optimization work referenced throughout this guide.

The same update reduced crashes too: Gearbox reports the crash rate has nearly halved since December, from 0.63% of sessions down to 0.38%. Lighting got a pass as well, with Kairos's dynamic time-of-day cycle now leaning on Unreal Engine 5's Virtual Shadow Maps to cache per-frame sun and shadow calculations instead of recomputing them constantly, which is part of why Shadow and Lighting Quality remain the two settings with the biggest FPS-per-notch payoff. None of this means Borderlands 4 is stutter-free now, but it does mean a fresh install today behaves meaningfully differently than it did at launch, so settings advice from those first few weeks is worth re-checking against Gearbox's current guide.

A status update on Borderlands 4 performance and optimization: https://t.co/dBlYMNzNpZ

— Borderlands (@Borderlands), March 23, 2026 on X

06Matching Your Hardware to a Level 70 Build

Gearbox's official minimum and recommended specs haven't changed with Version 1.10, but they're worth confirming against your rig before you start a fresh Level 70 build session. Minimum requires an Intel Core i7-9700 or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 16GB of system RAM, an 8-core CPU, 8GB of VRAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or Intel Arc A580. The recommended spec steps up to an Intel Core i7-12700 or Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB of RAM, and an RTX 3080, RX 6800 XT, or Intel Arc B580. Falling short on VRAM specifically is one of the fastest ways to see stutter that no settings tweak will fully fix, since the game will start swapping textures in and out rather than holding them resident.

The 100GB of storage Gearbox lists for both tiers is also worth taking seriously, and so is its SSD requirement, which applies at minimum spec and not just recommended. Kairos streams in as a single seamless world with no loading screens between regions, and that streaming is what the Hierarchical Level of Detail work mentioned above is built to support. Running the game from a mechanical hard drive works against that system directly, and it's one of the more common causes of pop-in and texture-streaming stutter that no Visuals menu setting will resolve on its own.

07Quick Answers Before You Load In

A few habits are worth locking in now that you're settled into the post-1.10 patch. Re-run Auto-Detect any time you install a new GPU driver rather than assuming your old manual settings still apply, since driver updates can change how a preset performs. If you're playing co-op with a friend who's on very different hardware, run Auto-Detect on each machine separately rather than copying one player's settings file onto the other's install — the preset is built around the specific GPU it detects, not a one-size profile.

Keep an eye on Gearbox's PC Performance Status Update page for the next round of changes, since the team has committed to continued monthly optimization passes on top of the weekly patches that ship alongside new Vault Hunter and story content. And if something still feels wrong after following this guide, the Steam store page and Gearbox's support channel are the fastest way to confirm whether it's a known issue rather than a setting you're missing. With the level cap now at 70 and Loveless the Hacker's dual-resource kit adding another layer of effects to the screen, it's worth revisiting this checklist again the next time Gearbox posts a major content update.