We should have tested the base consoles first. Instead, we kicked off our Borderlands 3 coverage with a look at how the game ran on Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro, where the results were something of a mixed bag, to say the least. Happily, the story is significantly more positive when checking out Borderlands 3 on the standard consoles – it’s by no means perfect, there are some frustrating issues, but the fundamentals are sound and the game is fine.
Perhaps key to the success of Borderlands 3 on PS4 and Xbox One is the fact that developer Gearbox essentially plays it safe. The evidence suggests that on consoles at least, it’s the vanilla PlayStation 4 that is the primary target platform: 1080p is the target resolution with superior performance to the Pro’s resolution mode, which targets 1800p – a 178 per cent increase in pixel-count when the console itself only delivers around 2x performance.
Obviously, image quality takes a hit by comparison – and there are some issues with more aggressive pop-in and texture streaming. However, frame-rates are much better: easily higher than the Pro’s resolution mode, and more consistent than the somewhat wobbly performance mode on the enhanced machine. The best word to describe Borderlands 3 on PS4 would be ‘solid’ – in the game’s initial stages, at least. Beyond that, the game is very similar to the Pro version we’ve already looked at, in both good and bad ways – close-up, texture work still looks rather rough on all platforms.
Looking at the game running on Xbox One S, Gearbox has gone ahead and made the compromise it didn’t seem to want to make on PS4 Pro – resolution is cut down to 1600×900. There are some further tweaks too. Anisotropic filtering is pared back by comparison to base PS4, resulting in more soupy looking ground textures when viewed at an angle, while foliage is also of a lower density. As we suspected when looking at the X version, it appears that the cutbacks Gearbox made for the S have unexpectedly persisted into the X game, where those same problems are visible – and hopefully patchable. Beyond that, I noticed lower quality geometry in the environments, but otherwise, Borderlands 3 on the base Xbox One holds up very well.
All of which leads us onto performance – the area where the enhanced consoles had genuine issues. Both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X featured performance and resolution modes, allowing users to choose between a 1080p output mode that unlocked frame-rate alongside an 1800p quality mode designed to get the best out of a 4K screen. Presumably owing to CPU issues, the performance mode fell short of expectations, while only Xbox One X delivered a reasonably consistent 30fps experience in its resolution mode. By comparison, the Pro’s resolution mode was a write-off with frame-rates lurking between 20-30fps.