When it comes to Borderlands 4 and its '8 cores or equivalent' requirement, it's actually core quality, not core count, that matters the most

In case you didn’t know, because you’ve been living on Pluto these past few days, Borderlands 4 has launched. It’s not exactly been smooth sailing for 2K Games and Gearbox Software, the publishers and developers, as the game’s overall performance is rougher than the Drake Passage.

To help matters (or make things worse, depending on your point of view), 2K produced a detailed chart of what settings Nvidia GPU owners should use to get the best performance. However, most of this just involved enabling upscaling and frame generation. Borderlands 4 is just plain hard on your hardware.

Especially the CPU, it would seem, because the minimum system requirements demand an ‘8 core (or equivalent)’ processor, citing an Intel Core i7 9700 as an example. Yesterday, I tested a very similar chip, the 9700K, in a rig with a Radeon RX 5700 XT and 1080p Low quality, and the CPU was frequently hitting 100% utilisation in the open world (see below).

But what if your gaming PC has a processor with fewer cores, a Core i5 or a Ryzen 5 chip, for example? Does that mean you’re going to be in trouble? To find out, I’ve spent the day running a series of tests on two gaming PCs, where I’ve decreased the number of cores and/or threads active in the BIOS.

Starting with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, with 48 GB of Corsair DDR5-8400 and a GeForce RTX 5080, I ran Borderlands 4 at 1080p with DLSS Performance enabled to minimise the impact of the GPU on the results. However, I did enable the Badass quality preset to ensure that the CPU was pushed as hard as possible.

As you can see, the unpopular 285K is pretty consistent, irrespective of what P- or E-cores are enabled. To be honest, the fact that the game runs as well as it does on just four P-cores (so four threads, as Arrow Lake doesn’t support HyperThreading) is absolutely remarkable. Sure, the 1% low frame rate isn’t great, and the game does stutter a bit more than normal, but overall not a bad showing.

As to why the performance just doesn’t consistently decrease with the core count, the answer is two-fold. One, Borderlands 4 distributes its workload across a whole host of threads, and none of them are especially heavy on a single core.

I used PIX on Windows to analyse the threads the game generates, and there are an awful lot of background worker threads to handle asset loading, the precompiled PSO pool, Bink (video compression), etc.

A presentation slide from the architectural launch of Intel's Arrow Lake processor design

(Image credit: Intel)

Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture is quite complex, as unlike previous designs, which comprised a block of P-cores topped by a block of E-core clusters, the distribution of cores in the 285K is such that disabling a couple of P- or E-cores leads to some odd behaviour on the ring bus that handles all the data traffic.

But what about a more traditional CPU design, where it’s just a block of identical cores that can handle two threads apiece? To answer this question, I used an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with 32 GB of DDR5-6000, and the same RTX 5080 graphics card.

Well, shiver me timbers, just look at those four little cores go! Much better than four Arrow Lake P-cores, that’s for sure, but don’t forget that the 9800X3D houses an almighty wodge of fast L3 cache, so a handful of Zen 5 cores aren’t going to be waiting much for data. What’s really remarkable, though, is how little difference there is between using just four cores, four threads and eight cores, 16 threads.

Obviously, both CPUs are sporting the very latest architectures from AMD and Intel, and I dare say that I’d get very different results using processors from five or six years ago.

I’m a bit disappointed to have not got to the bottom of why Borderlands 4 is so demanding on older CPUs, but I’ve not given up, and I plan to use PIX across more platforms to see just what’s going on. It could simply be a case that older chips don’t play ball as nicely as the latest ones do with Windows 11’s thread scheduler, or it could be something that’s symptomatic of Unreal Engine 5.

Either way, though, where 2K Games is telling you that eight CPU cores is the minimum, I can tell you now that this is not the case, as long as you’re using a relatively new six-core processor. Hurrah for small mercies, however they come.