Claptrap doesn’t ask for much, except if you want to play 4K…
At first glance, it may seem that Borderlands 3 has not changed much compared to its predecessors, but this time, Gearbox has decided to pull Unreal Engine 4 to give life to this explosive madness “drawn by hand”, improving lighting, shadows and the visual effects. On the other hand, it is a game that married the latest AMD hardware, both its Radeon Navi and its Zen 2 processors , and this translates into support for FidelityFX technology, so do not expect “green technologies” like DLSS or RTX ray tracing. Now, this does not prevent the game from running smoothly on a wide variety of hardware. Of course, if you want to play in high resolutions, you will have to pay attention to us…
Let’s make a first stop on the specifications:
Minimum:
- Windows 7/8/10
- AMD FX-8350 o Intel Core i5-3570
- 6 GB of RAM
- AMD Radeon HD 7970 o NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 de 2 GB
- 75 GB of available storage
Recommended:
- Windows 7/8/10
- AMD Ryzen 5 2600 o Intel Core i7-4770
- 16 GB of RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 590 o NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 de 6 GB
- 75 GB of available storage
At first glance the specifications are quite benevolent, but we must clarify a couple of points. Gearbox does not specify well what we can aspire to with them, because although it indicates “game at 1440p” with the recommended ones, we doubt that RX 590 can even take 30 fps at that resolution in Ultra. An RTX 2060 or an RX 5700 can either manage the game at 1080p and 60 fps, or even withstand the pull of the 1440p , but to access resolutions of 1440p or 4K you will have to call the older sisters, be the GTX 1080 Ti , RX 5700 XT or even the RTX 2080. But do not fear, because all this is if you want to stay in the configurations as preset. Here we have come to talk about graphic options that you can vary to gain frames per second without losing visual quality (at least not that you notice much):
- The collection of options Transmission of textures, Anisotropic filtering, Shadows, Detail of the terrain, Detail of the characters and Reflections of the space on the screen does not affect the performance especially, so you can respect them and move on to the following.
- The point at which we do have to stop is in the volumetric fog, responsible for the beautiful divine rays of all life (or “god rays”, if it makes you angry to see it in Spanish). If we disable this option, we can earn up to 24% performance, which is a gift for low-end graphics.
- Foliage is a niche improvement that can improve performance by 12% if we lower the quality to “Low.”
- The Drawing distance is an option that improves the detail on distant objects, but if we choose to reduce it we can find an additional 12% performance.
- Complexity of the material is an option that seems to define the detail of the surfaces in general, so lowering its quality can leave the visual experience a bit in diapers, but it is true that reducing it to “Low” provides up to 14% extra performance .
- Detail of the environment is another option that walks through the same Lares, although in this case the improvement remains at 7%.
There you have it. Borderlands 3 may not require much hardware, especially thanks to the general optimization of UE4, but the higher resolutions carry a requirement that transcends graphic engines, of course. What is true is that although the visual style remains faithful to that of the franchise, with all the explosion of effects that this new engine entails, fans of the saga will be delighted with the experience.
