After launching last week, a lot of online debate has swirled around performance problems in Borderlands 4. On PC, many players think the game isn’t very optimized despite Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford’s claims to the contrary. Over on console, the looter shooter sequel has its own performance problems that only get worse the longer you play. Pitchford’s solution: Restart the console every so often.
I primarily played Borderlands 4 on PC during my time with the game ahead of its launch. After dialing in the settings, and activating DLSS and frame gen, I was able to squeeze out a mostly solid 120 FPS experience out of it. However, when I hopped over to my PS5 Pro to play some Borderlands 4 with my friends online, I was no longer able to tweak settings and rely on frame gen. Instead, the PS5, PS5 Pro, and Xbox Series X versions of the game only have two options: Performance or Quality. Performance runs at 60FPS with lowered settings, and Quality runs at 30FPS at a higher resolution.
At first, things were fine in performance mode. But eventually, after a few hours, the game stopped running as well. Then it crashed, and when I restarted Borderlands 4, it was back to running at 60 FPS. This was my first clue that something was broken, and conversations online reveal I’m hardly alone in experiencing these issues.
Look online at places like Reddit, and you’ll quickly find players complaining that after a few hours of Borderlands 4, the game’s performance starts to tank on console. Weirdly, based on the posts I’ve seen online and on talking to my friends who don’t own PS5 Pros, it seems like it’s worse on Sony’s more powerful console. Here’s a video demonstrating the degradation in action. It also appears to be happening on Xbox. Some players are now restarting their consoles every two hours or so to avoid this bug. And that’s precisely what Gearbox’s very own CEO recommends, too.
Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play. Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 16, 2025
On September 16, Pitchford replied to someone complaining about PS5 Pro performance issues in Borderlands 4 and told them that it was a “known issue” after several hours of continuous play. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction,” added Pitchford. And while that does work, it’s a bit ridiculous in 2025 to tell people to restart their game every few hours to make it run better. It also doesn’t help his own claims that the game is pretty well optimized. Hopefully Gearbox has plans to fix this suspected memory leak issue on PS5 and to improve the game’s overall stability in the near future.
Borderlands 4 is out now on consoles and PC. We have a list of all the cool changes the game makes to the classic Borderlands formula here, and a whole post explaining how Shift codes and Gold Keys work in the game here.