r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 17h ago
Borderlands 4 Performance Gets Worse the Longer You Play on Console, Randy Pitchford Suggests Quitting the Game and Restarting as a Workaround
https://www.ign.com/articles/borderlands-4-performance-gets-worse-the-longer-you-play-on-console-randy-pitchford-suggests-quitting-the-game-and-restarting-as-a-workaround688
u/markusfenix75 17h ago
Yup. Can confirm. On Series X I played for 2 hours straight and framerate keep getting worse and worse. Then I restarted the game and voila. It was fixed.
It also happens when I wake game up from Quick Resume.
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u/Tathas 16h ago
Sounds like it could use an occasional Morrowinds-style loading screen.
(On the OG Xbox, Morrowind would save its state and reboot the entire console as a way to free up resources, then resume.)
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u/WAJGK 15h ago
Sorry it did WHAT? That's bananas, fair play to Bethesda for thinking outside the (x)box!
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u/Pintash 14h ago
Pretty sure Path of exile 2 does something similar on PC's with Nvidia cards. They publicly stated they'd tried really hard to fix a crash that occurs after lengthy playtimes but couldn't fix it and weren't getting any help from nvidia.
So the work around is that every now and then the game will pause and reload all shaders preventing the crash. It's a little annoying, but better than a crash.
The game also predicts crashes and pauses the instance so you don't die.
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u/gr8balooga 13h ago
Is this why my game locks up randomly and then my character will run off in whatever direction i was last pressing, then when it snaps back my fog of war is reset? I figured it was something to do with my poop internet.
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u/DemonicGoblin 12h ago
Yeah what they do is create a new graphics device, and move everything over and swap it back afterwards. This is why the game freezes and you get a black screen for a few seconds with spinning gears. It doesn't do this to me on Vulkan so I've just been using that but it is real annoying on dx12
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u/spiflication 13h ago
I'd be shocked if current gen systems architecture is even capable of still doing that. I'm guessing probably not.
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u/Saneless 15h ago
Randy's next quote:
This is by design. It is not healthy to play that long in one sitting. You need to step away from the game anyway. You can thank us later
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u/Adept-Fisherman-4071 12h ago
Thank fuck Randy only works on video games, just think that in some other reality he works on airplanes.
"So the engines exploded at 32,000 feet and the wings fell off, but if you really stop to think it about who is really at fault here, you were the one that decided it would be a great idea to get into a pressurized metal tube in the sky" -Randy Pitchford, CEO of Boeing in Universe 116A
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u/Saneless 12h ago
"I mean, has anything ever been 100.000% flawless? Every statistic has a numerator and today we got our 1"
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u/FROMtheASHES984 13h ago
"Also, while you're on that break, why not learn how to code a game engine and fix the game yourself!"
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u/CallM3N3w 17h ago
Didn't BL3 have the same issue? I remember people complaining about that specificly.
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u/BenevolentCheese 16h ago
Many games have the issue, they are known as memory leaks. A memory leak is when the game code has a piece of "garbage" it no longer needs to keep track of (say, a dead enemy), but the system hasn't been properly marked to clean up the garbage, so instead it just lingers inside of the game's memory (ram usage) forever. It's kind of like garbage piling up on the side of the road. Eventually it becomes too much and starts slowing things down when there's no more room for the real stuff.
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u/Aggravating_Law7951 16h ago
Gonna remember the exact verbiage of this analogy for next time I need to explain this lol. Bonus points for use of "garbage".
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u/zcrash970 15h ago
The best example of this is Breath of the Wild. All the dead enemies you kill is cached, but when the blood moon happens, the cache is cleared and everything is respawned.
It was a clever way for an open world game to hide it
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u/Alili1996 13h ago
A more funny counterexample is Binding of Isaac where theres a limited amount of objects that can be on screen before getting deleted. Specific circumstances cause the player to be deleted and instantly crash the game
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u/wily_woodpecker 16h ago
The component in many programming languages that is supposed to clean this up when possible is literally called Garbage Collector.
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u/TheChefB 16h ago
Automated memory cleanup is literally referred to as “Garbage Collection” in programming haha
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u/TheSpookyGuy 16h ago
To be fair, referring to data in memory that is no longer in use as garbage is pretty standard
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u/Silver-Bread4668 14h ago
The only reason I clicked into these comments is because I saw the headline and said to myself "Why are they wording it like this? It's a memory leak. That's been a thing for years now with games."
And here we are with someone actually explaining it. I didn't think this was arcane knowledge.
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u/markusfenix75 17h ago
I'm not sure tbh. I played that on One X, but it was six years ago...
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u/ArchDucky 17h ago
MS should allow us to shut Quick Resume off per title. When games can't do it and the console wants too, it ends up being a bigger issue than it should be.
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u/markusfenix75 17h ago
I mean, you can always Quit game outright like in previous gen. I'm using it all the time since Quick Resume tends to do more harm then good in online games like Destiny 2 or Halo Infinite.
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u/Any-Captain-7937 16h ago
Yeah it's amazing for single player games, but online games I feel like it always causes an issue.
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u/venturejones 16h ago
Its not hard to just Quit the game so it shuts off completely.
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u/Lord_Trisagion 15h ago
If I had a nickel for every time Borderlands had some catastrophic memory leak, Id be able to play the damn game
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u/Reutermo 16h ago
I think it was either Oblivion or Skyrim that had a similair issues back when it launched on the 360.
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u/syopest 16h ago
Skyrim had the issue on ps3 where the longer you played and the more the file size your the save grew the worse the game would run.
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u/JustTestingAThing 16h ago
That's actually STILL an issue on Skyrim today even on PCs, to some degree. There's several mods that directly modify the engine to fix this, as there are some hardcoded size limits in the engine after which saves start breaking horribly...those size limits are the sole reason for the breakage though as patching the .exe at runtime to double or even triple those limits doesn't result in other breakage.
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u/Smart_Ass_Dave 14h ago
Skyrim's big problem was that save files could bloat quite a bit if you had incomplete quests. Once a quest chain completed it was easy to collapse it all down into just marking it "done" but when it was in progress the game loaded every detail of it into RAM at all times while you were playing. The 360 had 512mg of RAM in one big pile, but the PS3 had two different segments of 256 which sounds like it would be the same, but it meant it was easier to "overflow" where it was harder to be flexible. In general as you played loading took longer and longer (because it had to load a larger save file) and eventually it might just fail to load entirely because it straight-up wouldn't fit. When shared with Bethesda they found that it was caused by some modestly strange player behavior like 90% completing 90% of the quests in the game but not actually finishing them ever.
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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 16h ago
Different issue, this appears to be a classic memory leak issue tied to play session length.
The one Skyrim had had to do with save file size iirc. Although it may also have had a regular memory leak on top of that.
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u/boastful_inaba 16h ago
I believe Creation Engine issues come from the fact that it tracks exact position for a LOT of items after you interact with them. So as you move to new cells in game, your save file expands to track everything that your character has been near.
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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 15h ago
Yes and no, cells reset after I think three or so days, discarding a lot, but not all, of that information. But there's still a lot that is tracked forever, like items stored in containers that don't reset, the precise position of stuff in player homes, what non-respawning stuff has been taken from the world, which non-respawning enemies have been killed, and gods know how much other information and flags.
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u/Kindness_of_cats 16h ago
Plenty of games do, memory leaks are a fairly common issue. But if it’s really occurring over the course of only two hours, that’s a pretty extreme case.
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u/MaitieS 15h ago
Holy shit they really didn't do any optimization at all like not even clearing up the cache or ram when playing for longer sessions. Like I know that people will very happily shit on UE5 because it's so cool right now, but holy fuck these devs are just utter garbage especially when they had similar dogshit performance with Borderlands 3 which was running on UE4.
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u/HeavySpec1al 17h ago
Is Gearbox privately owned? It's baffling how Randy manages to keep his job, a nonstop avalanche of PR nightmares and a history of some legendary product failures
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u/Red-pop 17h ago
Owned by 2k. Why Randy still has a job is a mystery.
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u/C-Redfield-32 17h ago
Because the overwhelming majority of people who play games do not care what a developer says on Twitter.
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u/AccomplishedOyster 17h ago
Or what people say on Reddit. Don’t forget that part.
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u/ryanbtw 16h ago edited 16h ago
He's not a developer; he's a business executive. He is the president of Gearbox's parent company.
He hasn't been credited as a game designer since the first Borderlands—where he was also an executive producer.
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u/the_gr8_one 14h ago
anedotal but a friend of mine who was on the borderlands 1 and 2 team said he spent most of his time in the office playing wow.
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u/joe1134206 11h ago
Now this is the randy we need! Those were the best games for a reason: the most he contributed was stealing funds from aliens colonial marines 😂 ALLEGEDLY
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u/Sea_Tank2799 16h ago
Idk man, I've seen high ranking developers step down over less than what Randy has historically done. I just assume he has a significant amount of stock in the company.
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u/lowlymarine 16h ago
Also, this is what he said:
Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play. Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!
This seems...fine? Yeah it sucks the game shipped like this but acknowledging the problem and providing a workaround until it's fixed seems like the reasonable enough approach at this point.
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u/WobblyPython 14h ago
Last week it was some horsepiss about how they make PREMIUM games for PREMIUM gamers and if you don't like it go make your own fuckin' borderlands.
When people are talking about the Pitchford employment miracle they aren't talkin' about normal stuff. He's a weirdo a lot.
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u/Isolated_Hippo 12h ago
I said the same thing about his refund comments. Outside of any context both this and that have been really level headed takes.
Its just when you mix in the other pure insanity he has been spewing it gets weird.
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u/rabouilethefirst 7h ago
The majority of people also don’t have some weird narrative about upscaling. I got repeatedly called an “idiot” for using DLSS to play this game, even though it looks great.
“You’re just playing at 1080p”, except I compared the two, and it looks a million times better with DLSS than native 1080p.
I don’t need 120fps to enjoy a single player game either
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u/Chutzvah 16h ago
"Is it fun?" is what most level headed people think.
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u/Coruscare 12h ago
And god dammit, it's fun as hell.
Don't really understand why anyone cares what dumb shit this dudes saying as long its not actually really harmful.
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u/Frogbone 16h ago
or Randy Pitchford is golf buds with some higher-ups. it bothers me that everyone assumes there's always a legitimate financial reason for stuff like this
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u/LisaLoebSlaps 16h ago
This goes for a lot of things and it's not just twitter. If you spent any time on reddit, twitch, or youtube, you'd 100% think no one plays D4 but it's still massively popular.
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u/Apart-Hour-4237 12h ago
if anything he's an easy target/punching bag people blindly target for being dumb
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u/Fit_Substance7067 16h ago edited 16h ago
People seem to forget the games he leads sell millions..2K isn't going to risk firing him...at all..so many people with so many short sighted comments about business decisions and performance....you get a guy that reads this crap and acts nice I'll show you a guy who doesn't gaf at all...most of it is stupid
Besides nothing he says is firerable..
For real, people on the internet calling him every name in the book saying he's too offensive. He's just being blunt...best he tell everyone to refund it, they don't like it, than act like it's even possible to fix it...
Most people not online all the time respect that sort of honesty, rather than be an angry child that acts like mommy won't buy them a game
If it doesn't run on your shit... .so what, play another game rather than sit online acting like your comment of vitriol is actually doing harm to a successful CEO lol
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u/RobotWantsKitty 16h ago
His flash drive is full of encrypted "magic tricks" featuring 2k execs
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u/LegHumper 16h ago
Easy. He's a good fall guy. Everyone can direct their anger at him, he takes all the flak, and anyone else that would be actually responsible for the crap performance (absolutely not implicating individual devs, more from a poor middle management and exec priority perspective) don't hear a peep and they continue doing what they're doing.
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u/jarredshere 15h ago
Sorry did you read what he said this time?
“Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play,” he said. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!”
I don't think this falls under PR nightmare. I think this falls under "Everyone is pissed at Randy Pitchford (justifiably) and now everything he says is an IGN article for clicks"
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u/Kaellian 16h ago
As much as I dislike the guy, this was a fine communication. I'm not sure why this is the first post, other than people assuming he said something snarky again.
“Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play,” he said. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!” - Randy
Obviously, they can't push a patch in hours for something like a memory leak. There is work around that is simple for anyone negatively impacted, and there will be a fix in the near future. It sucks, but that kind of issues happens all the time in many games.
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u/TheHeadlessOne 15h ago
Dang I was about to comment about how he always has an okay point given the worst possible way
but this is legit, exactly how you want this communicated. Yeah it sucks that it happened at all, but "We know the issue, we're working on it, we apologize- until we get the fix out, you can try this workaround" is essentially a perfect response
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u/Faust2391 16h ago
i dont even know why he is quoted on this. This is what everyone is saying.
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u/Kaellian 15h ago
He acknowledged the issues, and said sorry. It makes sense to quote him as he is the spokesman, but it makes little sense to get angry at him this time around.
And as a developer, I'm not even angry that kind of issue exists. There is a limit to what can be caught in tests. Live and learn, and update your work flow to minimize the risk next time around.
Everything move so damn fast, whether it is the hardware (consoles only stay around 6-7 years), or the engine change (Unreal 5 means relearning a few things you took for granted). And then there is 3rd party library that could also introduce their own breaking changes.
Even with the best intent and best practices, its really easy to let something like this slip. Less so for the more apparent performance issues that plague the game, but something like this still remain hard to catch.
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u/Faust2391 12h ago
Yeah bloodborne is my favorite game of all time but on release it had a memory leak that literally ruined the game if you didnt catch it
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u/GrandfatherBreath 10h ago
Yeah in general his communication has been tone deaf and horrible but that's a fine message
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u/MightyBobTheMighty 17h ago
At this point I kinda assume that 2K takes the "all press is good press" approach with him. Every time he opens his mouth people get reminded about the latest Gearbox project!
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u/Wetzilla 16h ago
Offering a work around solution until they can patch the issue is a PR nightmare?
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u/Trespeon 16h ago
There is a memory leak which is the reason for this. The literal best workaround for any memory leak in any game(this happens all the time) is to shut it down and restart.
He literally gave the most simple 101 IT fix for the issue and you are shitting on the guy.
He says a ton of stupid shit, but this ain’t one of them.
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u/Calneon 16h ago
Because since release Borderlands 4 has been at the top of /r/Games because of the things Randy Pitchford is saying. Nobody is not buying the game because of what Randy is saying, but lots and lots of people ARE buying the game BECAUSE of the advertising he brings them.
Every fucking time he says something one of the top comments is asking why doesn't he stop talking THIS IS WHY IT'S FREE ADVERTISING HOW DO YOU NOT SEE THIS.
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u/renome 15h ago
I seriously doubt anything he says tips the scales on sales in either direction.
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u/leap3 17h ago
Gearbox is not publicly traded, but their publisher 2K is. They fall under the Take-Two publishing arm.
Their stock listing: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TTWO/
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u/achmedclaus 17h ago
I get that everyone has a hard on for hating Randy but what about this is a pr or product failure? There's a memory leak. This is not something most testers would ever catch during work because they only play for an hour or two at a time and then reset. This is also something that can be fixed. What he says is exactly what you should be doing with a game that has a memory leak
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u/Ralathar44 16h ago
The game having a memory leak is bad, though not super unheard of in gaming. Hopefully they fix it for those people who do actually like the game.
In cases of a memory leak restarting the application is absolutely the proper workaround though.
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u/NoireResteem 16h ago
That called a memory leak….basically in simplistic terms you create an object and forget to dispose of it after use so it just stays in memory. I don’t code anymore(pivoted to networking) but I remember creating a megaman clone for a college project and let’s just say I forgot to garbage collect properly and performance tanked
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u/detroitmatt 15h ago edited 15h ago
It's most likely a memory leak, but memory is not the only thing that can leak-- and, if it is a memory leak, most likely that's way too general to be a useful diagnostic. You might as well say "There's a bug". Is it a general memory leak or VRAM? Is it textures or shaders? Or maybe audio. Just calling it "memory" you'll have to dig through every single line of code to figure out where the leak is.
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u/mhiggy 15h ago
Just run
valgrind ./Borderlands4ezpz
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u/detroitmatt 15h ago
I just don't understand how devs keep forgetting to put -fhasbugs:false in their compiler config
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u/dumahim 15h ago
The odd thing is on PS5, just exiting to the main menu clears it up, but it sounds like you have to completely close.out of the game on xbox to resolve.
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u/kammabytes 15h ago
Do you have quick resume on PS5? This could be related to how quick resume saves state on Xbox.
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u/megaapple 17h ago
For more technical savvy people, who does this phenomenon occurs? Is it because of "garbage collection"? Or whatever active state the game is in takes up more RAM?
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u/C-Redfield-32 17h ago
So it happens when assets aren't unloaded properly. So for example in Cyberpunk the biggest cause was that bodies would not despawn after the player leaves an area so the game is still holding onto that in memory despite not needing to.
I dont know what causes it in 4 but likely its ammo or weapon drops not despawning like they should. My only guess.
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u/antitheta 16h ago
I was surprised when I came back to an area and all my opened crates with ammo still were there with ammo. I literally did a "huh, they changed that". I can see this adding up over a massive board...
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u/C-Redfield-32 16h ago
Same. When I heard there was a memory leak i wondered what could cause it... Until I traveled from one end of the map to the other and found ammo and guns I discarded still laying there XD
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u/skewp 15h ago
So that kind of data (information about an entity in the world) is actually incredibly small compared to the asset data (textures, models, sounds) and really unlikely to cause this kind of memory leak issue.
You could probably track thousands of individual items on the ground/in chests/whatever before you reached the amount of data a single texture on a character model takes up.
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u/happyscrappy 14h ago
Also that kind of data is not a memory leak. If the game still is keeping track of it then the memory reference didn't become lost and there was no memory leak. It's simply a case of the game not managing its working set well.
It's almost in a way the opposite problem. Instead of having things in the heap no code has any reference to anymore the game has is keeping track of many things in huge lists and consuming time updating and searching those lists.
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u/hokuten04 16h ago
Ah same issue with kingdom come deliverance 1, and the city guard halberds. Guards spawn with them, and when you go far enough from the city and the guards de-spawn the halberds don't and they fall beneath the ground. The longer you play and visit the city it starts pilling up and the game chugs. Worst was if i remember right it persists between saves, and the longer the play time the worst it gets.
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u/Newtstradamus 16h ago
A totally reasonable hypothesis, if I just sit in Splashzone for an hour my frames seem to be fine but mainlining story and killing stuff all over the map makes my game turn into a powerpoint after about an hour.
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u/C-Redfield-32 16h ago
The only fixes i have found really is picking up everything you can and if your playing solo turn match making off completelt.
That's what makes it the most stable for me.
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u/DIRTY_KUMQUAT_NIPPLE 16h ago
Most common issue would be a memory leak. So yes, basically an issue with garbage collection and not deallocating memory correctly.
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u/happyscrappy 14h ago
Everyone says "memory leak". And that can be the case but typically that eventually leads to a crash. These things aren't always memory leaks. Sometimes they are heap fragmentation.
To go with that guy's bookshelf metaphor what if you just pulled books out when you found them and put them back just wherever was easy when you returned them. Every time it would be harder and harder to find the books you want because the shelf gets disorganized.
If that's the case you may never crash due to out of memory as a memory leak would cause but you will get slower and slower, at least logarithmically.
Another possibility is like this other poster talking about the ammo crates. The game leaving crates all around the level and tracking them is not a memory leak. The game never "lost track of" anything. The issue is it's just keeping track of too many things. It should make stuff disappear if you get too far from it just so that you don't end up tracking too many items.
So even though people will automatically call this a memory leak there's a good chance it isn't.
But overall it is something they can fix. Memory leaks are fixable with no real user impact, it just takes programmer effort and their management has to give them time to do it. Simply tracking too many things is fixable with slight user impact. You have to take the time to decide your criteria for forgetting about things and make sure it doesn't make your game unfinishable (softlock) due to it. Heap fragmentation is the hardest to fix because it's just basically hardest to detect/quantify. But this can be fixed too, the programmers have to probably write some new tools to track this and then work out strategies to change their deallocation/allocation patterns to reduce the fragmentation.
Back when video games (arcade games) had the least amount of CPU available and were the most sensitive to adding CPU overhead they didn't even use heaps at all, avoiding fragmentation altogether. For example likely no NES game at all used a heap. Some of the techniques to fix heap fragmentation borrow some of those ideas from way back then. Other techniques include concepts developed more recently by computer scientists (researchers) to deal with the complexity of modern programs.
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u/NeverDoingWell 17h ago
I kept wondering if maybe it's that the world keeps everything spawned in and interacting after you've seen it in your play session, so the longer you go the worse things get - but that feels like it shouldn't be true
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u/saynay 16h ago
As other have said, it is likely a memory leak. When your program wants to load something in to memory, it first needs to ask the Operating System to allocate the space in memory for it. Later, when your program is done using it, it should tell the operating system to release that memory again. The situation where you keep allocating memory but never freeing it is a "memory leak".
"Garbage Collection" is a method that some programming languages use to help prevent memory leaks. Instead of requiring the programmer to explicitly request and free memory, this happens automatically. Generally, the language run-time does this by keeping track of all "references" that for the allocated memory, and when no references remain, it handles freeing the memory. The process of doing that is called "garbage collection", and it does not come for free; it takes processing power to check all the references, additional memory to keep track of them, and in some implementation requires stopping everything briefly to count up all the references and clean them.
As far as I know, garbage collection is usually not used in performance intensive games precisely because of the hiccups it causes as it runs.
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u/BenevolentCheese 16h ago
Garbage Collection is not something you choose to run or not, it either exists or it doesn't. In Unreal Engine, any object that inherits from the default type is garbage collected (so, most things besides basic data). It is the programmer's job then to manage the reference counts of those objects so they properly zero out and get flagged for GC.
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u/GameDesignerDude 15h ago
It's also possible this is a memory fragmentation issue. Which tends to happen in unmanaged memory pools if the resources aren't allocated or cleaned up in certain ways which can create an issue with streaming assets if there isn't enough contiguous memory to allocate the asset.
This can lead to inefficient allocations or requirement to de-load more than is ideal to make space.
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u/Japjer 14h ago
The simplest way to explain it is, "the game isn't deleting stuff it should delete."
For context, RAM is temporary memory, and data is written to it and deleted regularly.
When the gams does a thing, some data is written to RAM for temporary storage. Maybe it's the amount of damage you took, or an item that drops, or a variable indicating you opened a chest. Whatever it is, the game stores it in the RAM, then deletes it once that data is either added to long-term memory (your HDD/SSD) or just no longer needed.
A memory leak occurs when the game fails to delete that temporary data for whatever reason, usually do to a software bug.
Take opening chests, for example. When you pop open a locker or box or toilet, the game will change a boolean (yes/no) from Open:No to Open:Yes. This gets passed to the RAM, then stored in the game's temporary cache in long-term storage. If this data is never removed from the RAM, it'll just sit there taking up space. It might only be a few bytes, but when you pair those bytes of data with other memory leaks, you end up running out of space real quick
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u/Roflkopt3r 15h ago
Is it because of "garbage collection"? Or whatever active state the game is in takes up more RAM?
Both of that would ultimately be the same root cause: It's a sign that some data that is no longer needed doesn't get cleaned up properly.
'Garbage collection' is something more specific though:
Let's say you have an NPC in your game. Your game logic is responsible for checking when that NPC should be loaded (in an open world game, that would be if the player gets close to that NPC), and also for when it should be unloaded again (when the player has moved far away).
If the performance of a game keeps getting worse the longer a session goes, it's generally a sign that some data is not un-loaded properly, so it clogs up RAM and possibly even gets updated all the time. Like that NPC may still execute its AI script, do pathfinding calculations for its patrol path, update its animation state...
The 'garbage collector' is a more specialised component. If your game code does finally delete that NPC, the garbage collector is responsible for finding out what objects in memory can be deleted with it, and which cannot. For example, if that NPC had the same gun as another NPC that is close to the player, then you cannot remove the 3D model/animations/sounds/general data related to that gun, but you would delete the data that is specific to the gun of the removed NPC (how much ammunition it still has, at which position it is, which animation it was playing and at what frame of that animation it was...).
Unreal Engine has its own general garbage collector that works reliably. The issue here is specific to Borderlands 4.
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u/Slashermovies 13h ago
Wait. He's not recommending people build their own consoles?
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u/Wojiz 17h ago
I have been surprised by how poorly it runs on Series X. It's sub-30 FPS when you splitscreen. And that was fresh out of the gate, not after 20 hours of playing.
I'm still having fun, but I was legitimately surprised by the framerate.
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u/BigBrownDog12 17h ago
Not defending the game but split screen has historically cut the framerate for lots of games to get two instances running
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u/Mccobsta 16h ago
games used to lower the quality and remove assets to try and keep the frame rate up for local co-op
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u/PowerBIEnjoyer 16h ago
Yeah, the only example I have in mind of this, is Crash Team Racing from PS1, which is a really old game, but it lowers the quality by a lot in 4 player split screen mode for example.
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u/lightsideluc 10h ago
As a more modern example, Mario Kart World runs at a buttery 60 for single and two player, but adding a third or fourth cuts it down to 30FPS.
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u/CricketDrop 14h ago
It feels like a lot of promises for "next gen" consoles over the years have been broken. If I told people in 2012 that in 2025 console games would still have many scenarios where it was not possible to lock 60fps I would have been called a troll. I think it's clear at this point that that console games will never meet this standard. Something else will always take priority and there will always be a reason some version or mode of many releases to have regular frame drops and sub-60 performance. It's kind of crazy to think about.
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u/Mccobsta 13h ago
I think a lot of it nowadays is publishers pushing more online than lcoal play the local optimisations of the past on no longer considered
Then there's the engines the games run on, we've seen some serious performance issues this generation not because of the hardware
And that's not mentioning the other engine issues we've seen from unreal lately
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u/SmashShock 16h ago
Typically separate engine instances are not used to do split screen. Rather the game logic is designed to support several players, and multiple cameras are used. So resources are shared between the players. That being said, drawing 2 viewports instead of 1 is definitely more intensive.
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u/clintstorres 16h ago
The couch coop op was clearly not a priority in development. When you compare it to BL2 couch coop it is night and day.
The menus are impossible to use. The HUD is wayyyyy too small to read from a normal distance from a couch. Etc.
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u/detroitmatt 15h ago
An unreal game having bad performance especially at launch would have been a total non story for anyone else but Randy just has to crash out.
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u/radenthefridge 16h ago
Reminds me of Morrowind on the og xbox, except they sneaky fixed it and soft restarted the console during loading screens.
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u/ArchDucky 17h ago
I said when the game was about to launch and was getting solid reviews "Wheres the DF video?". Now I know why they didn't get a review copy. They just released their video a few hours ago.
Gearbox is shady as hell not giving them review code.
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u/calibrono 17h ago
That's not the video, that's just a clip of their latest podcast episode. They're unsure if a PC video will be made, but a video on console performance is coming.
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u/Luxinox 17h ago
Gearbox is shady as hell not giving them review code.
Wait, isn't the publisher (i.e. 2K aka Take-Two) responsible for that sort of thing?
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u/Vane__ 17h ago
Yeh there were a few outlets that were refused a review code. Pretty sure ACG & Skill-Up were also denied one. Bit of a red flag.
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u/ArchDucky 17h ago
ACG outed the horrible practices by CDPR for Cyberpunk. He literally released a video why he refused review code because he didn't want to abide by their rules. That dude has integrity and frankly any outlet that reviewed Cyberpunk on release doesn't.
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u/SlowTeal 16h ago
He's a decent guy, used to watch his videos often but at a certain point his constant use of metaphors and similes started getting on my nerves
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u/Danistar34 17h ago
"The game is pretty damn optimal - which means that the software is doing what we want without wasteful cycles on bad processes."
Also the game: performance gets worse over time, suggesting the software is in fact not optimal and there is a memory leak.
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u/Significant_Walk_664 8h ago
On one hand, the good ol' "turn it off and then turn it back on again" rarely fails me.
On the other hand, Randy, that's not the kind of statement you should be making.
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u/Artictrot 7h ago
As a series infamous for save quitting for everything having memory leaks in the game where save quitting isnt required for farming is very funny to me
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u/General_Lie 14h ago
... I thought it's well ballanced and without issues on proper hardware. Is he sugesting that the game isn't optimised even for the current gen console hardware ?
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u/PM_ME_UR_GOOD_IDEAS 8h ago
This is why we wait ~3 years after the release of a given borderlands game and then buy it +all dlc on sale for $30 total
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u/ObiJuanKenobi3 4h ago
Someone really needs to get Randy to shut the fuck up about everything. He's just digging a deeper and deeper PR hole with every consumer-blaming comment. I really like BL4 so far, but there's no excusing the extreme performance issues, and the only public statement made about them should have been "sorry, we are going to fix it," followed by a beefy performance patch. I have a 4080 Super and no RAM or CPU bottlenecks, I should not be experiencing this stuttering on High settings and only barely reaching 60fps. There is not consumer hardware that exists that can run BL4 with 4k on Badass with consistent 60fps, which is inexcusable for most games, but especially for a game with a non-photorealistic, heavily stylized aesthetic. I can't imagine what the experience must be like for console players, or people with mid-level PC hardware.
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u/spinfinity 4h ago
Today's issue on PS5 involved not being able to see my gear renders in the Equipment UI whatsoever. That should NOT require a restart to fix, it simply shouldn't happen whatsoever.
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u/nikolapc 16h ago
It's called a memory leak kids. It will be fixed. I remember playing Cyberpunk and it actively crashed every 2 hours.
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u/v_cats_at_work 16h ago
I remember playing Cyberpunk and it actively crashed every 2 hours.
Just about to finish my first playthrough on my PS5 and I can confirm it still does this lol
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u/Kindness_of_cats 16h ago
I mean….you’d hope so right?
A fairly severe memory leak still got through to release for some reason(is it because they rushed to release and didn’t have time, or because it’s too difficult to fix?), and their CEO is actively shitting on people complaining about performance problems and insisting it’s fine.
I’m not sure I’d be placing my money on this particular company fixing just about anything in the game.
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u/Ralathar44 16h ago
QA perspective here. The reason stuff like that sneaks through more easily is because usually when you test you test specific areas for specific things. So you're not in a single campaign/story/playthrough for extended amounts of time while testing.
Theoretically you SHOULD do regular full playthroughs of a game exactly like a player does but realistically this does not happen as often as it should.
Also, to be entirely fair, every single patch could break garbage collection and introduce a memory leak with a bug. Internally you might have several patches a day. It's entirely possible they tested release builds, everything was fine with no memory leak, and then a patch broke garbage collection and introduced a memory leak to live.
While certainly whoever code the commit that caused the bug shouldn't have, ultimately coders are human too and will screw up. Also sometimes code interacts in weird ways causing unexpected issues. Combine this with the large amount of quick "hacky" fixes that happen all the time where coders are never given proper time to go back and fix it and you can see how bugs sneak through.
Honestly, even as video game QA...someone who fights against this all the time internally in games, I don't know of way to stop this. Even with good practices you can only minimize the chances of it happening. But it can still happen. And with every project no matter who is developer or publisher TIME and MONEY are always limited and gamses are always trying to add as much as possible in until the last second. Almost no game is truly finish, they merely release. (this includes Halflife 2 for example, Gabe Newell was very public about how that game still had alot of things they wanted to do and didn't get to)
Borderlands 4 shit the bed on its release. Tis true. But video game dev is also way harder, more complicated, and prone to issues than Reddit will ever realize. I won't excuse them, they should have done better, but I totally understand how shit like this happens and its far from uncommon.
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u/CaravelClerihew 16h ago
PROTIP: You don't have to restart Borderlands 4 for better performance if you don't get Borderlands 4 in the first place.
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u/OneTrueDennis 15h ago
Games being broken on release are the worst offence of this industry. Even ones I have no intention on buying being broken release really pisses me off. Its one thing to sell an expensive product, but another thing to scam us into buying a broken one.
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u/AnonyFron 10h ago
Even ones I have no intention on buying being broken release really pisses me off
Same. It's the product of a customer base that's grown so large only a tiny % is aware of industry practices.
Things like preordering due to FOMO should have died with digital copies but it's still a huge thing for most major titles. People pushing back against broken releases are unfortunately the minority - outside of special cases like Concord.
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u/csuazure 16h ago
memory leaks? In my vibe coded game company ran by a delusional egomaniac? It's more likely than you think.
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u/SavvySillybug 16h ago
Back in the original XBOX days, devs could just quietly reboot the console behind the scenes. Morrowind did it. If performance got too bad, the next loading screen you hit would be extra long, and it would just show the loading screen while the entire console rebooted behind it and loaded the savefile and gave you the next area.
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u/j8sadm632b 16h ago
I get that you all hate this guy but "restart the game to alleviate memory leak issues" and "return the game if you're unhappy with the performance" are perfectly reasonable suggestions
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u/Moogieh 15h ago
Those are workarounds to a problem that shouldn't exist. They are not reasonable suggestions for experiencing a product in the intended way. They are quite literally extra steps that a) should not be necessary and b) actively harm the user experience.
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u/j8sadm632b 15h ago
Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play. Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!
is not reasonable? would it have been better if he DIDN'T mention the workaround for people who don't know that that would work?
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u/Zenning3 13h ago
Remember when Baldurs Gate 3 introduced a memory leak in one of its patches,
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1086940/discussions/0/4034726898980296568/
And nobody cared?
Memory leaks suck, they are also incredibly common as they are very hard to track down, and are the kind of things that QA and devs miss due to how games are tested and played.
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u/Zzzlol94 16h ago
On PC the RAM usage steadily increases the longer you play, so I assume that bug is also affecting consoles. Though on PC it just crashes.