Gearbox CEO channels inner Claptrap, offers himself up as personal tech support over rampant Borderlands 4 PC performance issues — 'Would you like help tuning with your personal specification?'

In the weekend and change since its launch, Borderlands 4 has quickly become notorious as a PC resource hog the likes of which we have never seen before. Now, after days of personally crusading against complaints of poor optimization and performance issues, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has taken to offering personal tech support to players struggling for performance.

After early reports at the weekend that Borderlands 4 was crushing even the most powerful PCs — the 5090 can't manage native 60fps in some scenarios — publisher 2K put out an extensive list of recommended graphics settings for a variety of resolutions on both AMD and Nvidia cards.

Pitchford's own contribution has been decidedly more controversial. "Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing," he posted on Monday in an X post, which received so much backlash that it got a community note.

In his less philosophical tweets, Pitchford has insisted that many of the Borderlands 4 players experiencing performance issues are simply demanding too much of their hardware, and that many would benefit from turning down the resolution or dialling up frame generation tech like DLSS. However, that hasn't stopped him from moving to offering personal tech support to people struggling.

"Would you like help tuning with your personal specification?," he asked one user with an RTX 5080 in a tone that will be all too familiar to fans of the franchise. "You should be in good shape," he replied. "Run on that 1440p monitor. Recommend two inputs into that G8 so you're running it split screen. What FPS are you getting? Vsync off. Disable anti-aliasing. Use DLSS. Multi-frame generation at 4x. nVIDIA Reflex: On. Match your frame rate limiter to your monitor's refresh rate. You can set everything to very high (but you can gain some more frames if you turn down or off the volumetric fog). Let me know what FPS you get with those settings."

"At 1440p you should be blazing fast," he continued. Pitchford has responded to plenty of comments about the game's poor performance and optimization with offers of personal tech support, not all of them landing well. "You are being unbelievably insufferable, Randy," one user retorted to his offer. "I'm trying to be helpful," the beleaguered CEO replied, before asking: "What do you think would be helpful? What would you have me do?"

Pitchford's messaging is certainly more than a little mixed and likely not helping the reception to the game. On the one hand, he has insisted the game is built well and that users are demanding too much of their hardware. On the other hand, Gearbox has pushed out a couple of PC performance patches, and the CEO says they are continuing work behind the scenes. Fans of the tenured looter shooter would be remiss not to admit that there's more than a little hint of the desperation that made its one-wheeled protagonist Claptrap an infamous mainstay of the series in his posts.

Borderlands 4 is the latest installment in Gearbox's popular looter shooter franchise, and in many ways is a hefty departure from previous games. It eschews the setting of homeworld Pandora for the first time, pitting players into a fight for liberation from the Timekeeper, the overlord of the planet Kairos.

Performance issues aside, fans can expect a return of many of Borderlands' most popular mechanics, including randomly generated loot, humorous dialogue, and prolific violence.

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