Borderlands GOTY technology test

– Gearbox has optically revised Borderlands GotY. BitcoinMinersHashrate compared the new edition with the original in the test. The result is impressive. Benchmarks with different graphics cards show that the performance can convince. However, there is still a lack of stability.

Borderlands GotY is visibly prettier

Forever an issue in the rumor mill, Gearbox Borderlands 3 officially announced in March. To shorten the currently unknown waiting time for the newest part, there is a 4K texture pack for Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel today. And Borderlands – the first part – is now available in a Game of the Year Edition (GotY), which the developers have revised graphically.

The Borderlands GotY, which is essentially ten years old, does not suddenly become a graphic hit; Already the anti-aliasing alone should be better, because the integrated FXAA cannot completely prevent the geometry flickering even in high resolutions. But in connection with the Cel shading graphics, Borderlands GotY shows the most beautiful claptrap of all time – the much younger The Pre-Sequel cannot keep up. The visual style has remained unchanged. The player recognizes in places within seconds what game it is. And that’s how it should be with an only optically improved version.

Visually improved, but not flawless

Even if Borderlands GotY looks good graphically, the PC version is not flawless. The game occasionally crashed on various graphics cards with a long error message during testing. And the options menu is also a bit bitchy.

If the Ultra HD resolution is set, it will be adopted correctly for the time being. However, it can happen that the next time you open it, a different resolution suddenly appears in the menu and when you press the ESC key (this is how you confirm changes and close menus), even if you never specified the change yourself. Anisotropic filtering is also deactivated each time the game is started.

Many options, complicated tuning

The graphics menu of Borderlands GotY shows several similarities with the original, but the options themselves are sometimes different. A new addition is the FPS limiter known from Borderlands 2, with which the frame rate can be limited to 30, 50, 60, 75, 100, 120 or 144 FPS. Alternatively, there is an option that tries to keep the game’s frame rate in the 22-22 FPS range by adjusting the graphics quality, but this is not recommended.

1.     The Borderlands GOTY graphics menu  

image 1 Of 3

With “Low”, “Medium”, “High” and “Ultra” there are four different presets to adapt the graphics quality of the Unreal Engine 3 to your own computer. “Ultra” is also the maximum possible quality. The “Ultra” and “High” presets do not change the graphics much. The shadows are somewhat softer with “High”, moreover the anisotropic filtering is reduced. That’s it with visible changes. Accordingly, almost nothing happens in terms of performance. The GeForce GTX 1060 is 6 percent faster, the Radeon RX 580 only 2 percent.

The “Medium” preset then significantly reduces the quality: Most shadows are no longer displayed at all, the textures are a little blurred, there is a little less texture filtering and the LOD works very aggressively. In motion, objects pop up just in front of the player, which is annoying. The performance gain is high at 49 percent at AMD and 62 percent at Nvidia. Nevertheless, the medium setting should only be used if there is no other way.

The low preset simply makes everything a little worse. However, this only has a very small influence on the frame rate of 8 (AMD) and 13 percent (Nvidia). It is striking that the performance gain of a GeForce graphics card is higher due to the reduced quality than on a Radeon.

Graphic presets in Borderlands GOTY

• Low-Preset
• Central Preset
• High-Preset
• Ultra-Preset

Borderlands GotY thus has four graphics presets, but ultimately only two levels that really differ from each other in terms of appearance and performance. There is hardly any meaningful tuning potential.

On the next page: test series, test system and graphics settings

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