If you didn’t know because you lived in a platoon over the past few days, Borderlands 4 has started. It was not polished sailing for 2K games and Gearbox software, publishers and programmers, because the general performance of the game is more rugged than a fragment of Drake.
To lend a hand in matters (or worsen the situation, depending on your point of view), 2K has developed a detailed chart of what NVIDIA GPU settings should exploit to get the best performance. However, most of them concerned growth AND RAM generation. Borderlands 4 is simply effortless strenuous on your equipment.
It seems that especially the processor, because the minimum system requirements require a “8 core (or equivalent)” processor, citing, for example, Intel Core i7 9700. Yesterday I tested a very similar system, 9700K, in the platform with Radeon RX 5700 XT and 1080p of low quality, and the processor often hit 100% exploit in the open world (see below).
But what if your game computer has a processor with fewer cores, for example Core i5 or Ryzen 5? Does this mean that you will be in trouble? To find out, I spent the day running a series of tests on two games for games in which I reduced the number of cores and/or vigorous threads in BIOS.
Starting from Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, with 48 GB Corsair DDR5-8400 and GeForce RTX 5080, I ran Borderlands 4 at 1080p with DLSS efficiency enabling minimalization of GPU impact on results. However, I enabled the Badass Quality setting to ensure that the processor was as hard as possible.
As you can see, the unpopular 285K is quite consistent, regardless of what c or E core is turned on. To be truthful, the fact that the game works as well as on four Core P (so four threads, because Lake Arrow does not support hypertreading) are absolutely unusual. A brilliant, 1% low number of frames per second is not great, and the game is slightly more than normal, but in general it is not a bad show.
As for why the performance simply does not decrease with the number of the core, the answer is twice. First of all, Borderlands 4 spreads the load on work throughout a whole series of threads and none of them is particularly hefty on one core.
I used Pix in Windows To analyze the threads generated by the game, and there are terribly many employee threads to support resource charging, pre -compiled PSO pool, bink (video compression), etc.
Arrow Arrow Lake Intel architecture is quite elaborate, because, unlike previous projects, which included a block of p-core topped with an e-core cluster block, the cores distribution in 285K is such that the exclusion of a few cores P or E leads to some strange behavior on the ring bus that supports all data movement.
But what about the more classic processor design, in which it is only a block of identical cores, which can handle two threads per piece? To answer this question, I used AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3D with 32 GB DDR5-6000 and the same RTX 5080 graphics card.
Well, Shiver Me Timbers, look only at these four petite cores! A lot This is definitely better than four P-Lake Lake core, but do not forget that 9800x3D houses all-powerful water with rapid L3 cache, so a handful of Zen 5 cores will not wait much for data. What is really unusual is how little difference exists between the exploit of only four cores, four threads and eight cores, 16 threads.
Of course, both processors have the latest AMD and Intel architecture and I dare say that I will receive very different results using processors from five or six years ago.
I am a bit disappointed that I did not reach the lower part, why Borderlands 4 is so demanding on older processors, but I did not give up, and I plan to exploit PIX on more platforms to see what is happening. It may simply be a coincidence that older systems do not play football as nicely as the latest with the schedule of Windows 11 thread, or it can be something that is symptomatic Unreal Engine 5.
Either way, where 2K Games tells you that the eight processor cores are a minimum, I can now say that this is not the case, if you exploit a relatively recent six -core processor. Hurra for little mercy, but they come.
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