I realize triple-A games aren't to the tastes of most regulars here, even those who do play games, but just in case it's useful for anyone:
Borderlands 4 worked well out of the box when purchased on Steam.
Using DLSS upscaling had no problems initially, but shortly thereafter some artifacting occurred. Disabling DLSS corrected the problem immediately.
With DLSS off, the game can be extremely demanding when run at high resolutions. It supports FSR, TSS, and XeSS as alternative upscalers. I haven't tested them, but would be happy to if it would help anyone.
Borderlands 4 does have a "Game Ready Driver," but it was only released for Windows so far. Today did see a new Linux driver release, but it was a single bug fix for a blank screen issue.
I crashed once in nearly 11 hours of play. I don't consider that problematic on day 1, using Proton. Somewhat more concerning (but also happening only once) was the fact that at some point alt tabbing in and out caused the game to perform poorly. I had to reboot to sort it out. I think it may have been Steam getting confused about whether the game was active or not and doing shader caching when it shouldn't have.
System requirements are fairly high. The kicker was that it requires an 8 core processor. Running at 4k, with everything maxed, my GPU usage is consistently 95-98% on an RTX 5090, but framerates are smooth. My best friend, on virtually the same hardware but using an RTX 2080 Ti had no complaints about performance when using medium settings, DLSS on, 1440p, on Windows.
Gonna have to keep us updated on how the game goes as you progress and finish it. I recall my friend and I got Borderlands 3 for cheap one year and uhh... let's just say, it didn't exactly leave the best taste in our mouths after we were done with it.
That being said, I do wish we had more "looter shooters" that had as much gun variety as the Borderlands series has always done.
Your reaction was common and acknowledged by Gearbox to the point that almost every interview reiterated that they knew they'd blown the writing. Borderlands 2's writing was IMMEASURABLY better, to the point that even the CEO of Gearbox (who is actually involved with development, unlike many) called Borderlands 2 "lightning in a bottle." Anthony Burch was the writer for the villain, and the voice actor did an outstanding job, as well as helped define the character and his nature. I honestly consider Handsome Jack the second best game antagonist I've ever seen.
Compare to Borderlands 3 where you've got bratty, petulant livestreamers with attention issues as the villains and some really lame writing, and it's no wonder it didn't suit you. One interview I read said the game director on Borderlands 3 had an edict that there be a joke every second. We saw how that worked out. The DLC for 3 was better than the base game, but the game put so many off that I'm not sure how many people ever tried it.
60+ hours in (and locked out for 24 hours due to this), I can honestly say the obnoxious writing is almost entirely purged. There are a few sidequests that are bizarre, silly, or innuendo filled, but they're exceptions, and while the franchise needed to grow up with its players, the weird has always been part of Borderlands, and I wouldn't want it excised entirely.
Some updates on my notes above:
I am apparently old and easily satisfied with lower frame rates. I've been content with my performance as described above, but when checking actual FPS, what felt fine to me was 30 FPS, which many will find too low. That's on a 5090. Cyberpunk 2077, with everything turned on and no DLSS gets 70. The game's optimization NEEDS WORK.
Changing things back and forth to try to improve framerate is how I got locked out. This isn't a Borderlands thing; it's a Denuvo thing, but for now, the two are part and parcel. I'm hoping 2K patches it out in a month or two; that is a thing some publishers do.
Do I still recommend Borderlands 4 on Linux right now? Only with a big asterisk for those who know they'll enjoy it. The Denuvo lockout shouldn't hit most people (it's most common when people are trying different Proton versions, as that reads as different computers), but the performance is really, really bad unless you've got great hardware or are willing to turn down settings and resolution. Hardware Unboxed on YouTube has numbers.
I'm VERY glad to hear that this is the case. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it in the next few months and seeing how the performance changes etc before jumping in, but at least that tells me the worst part of 3 has been removed.
Honestly I also wouldn't be surprised if some (or a large chunk) of the performance hit would be Denuvo itself tbh. I know a lot of games in the past have struggled with it, and once it gets removed it helps them usually quite a bit. Given how performance hungry the game is by default, I'm sure that's adding to the pile.
I can stomach 30fps, I mean christ a lot of games I grew up playing I played in low teens and just said yup, that's how games are. But I definitely would like more for how much I might be spending now, too. No more rentals from the library
Yeah, I beat Quake 1 as a sideshow. I can't help but feel that people demanding extremely high frame rates are spoiled, but by the same token, it's a LOT harder to shoot things that move around in games as they do today compared to Wolfenstein 3D. It's even worse with actual players, though that doesn't apply to Borderlands.
Anyway, yeah, my recommendation is to wait. Unless you're a major fan with a very high end system, chomping at the bit for it, it'll be better later.
In this case, I would be. I have some very limited experience with Denuvo at work, and this LOOKS like a less intrusive implementation to me. Even if I'm wrong about that, and I easily could be, Borderlands 4 is pushing my GPU to 95-98% utilization at all times, and Denuvo doesn't do anything with GPUs.
But nice that it work on Linux.
