Gaming Tests: Borderlands 3

As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.

BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:

  • 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass

BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.

AnandTech Low Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Low Quality
High Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Max Quality
Average FPS
95th Percentile

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

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  • Threska - Monday, November 16, 2020 - link

    Depends upon advantage.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/11/16/nvidia-l...
  • FreckledTrout - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    AMD finally has an Intel beater on its hands at least until Rocket Lake arrives. Having actual competition is going to be great computing. Nice review.
  • duploxxx - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link

    nothing confirmed on Rocket Lake...

    fishy results with a so-called avg turbo ghz which actually shows it was doing 5ghz.
    a total unknown release date, expected at the end of Q1 2021 on a dead platform with some kind of pcie-4 . yeah really looking forward.
  • Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    They'd have to get north of 5.3Ghz consistently to beat AMD.

    I just don't think they can, which would make the product pretty hilarious - big die, lots of heat, no performance crown.
  • hbsource - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Very impressive. I think I'm good with my 3950X until the next socket but the single thread uplift is very tempting.
  • FireSnake - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    @Ian:
    "With AMD taking the performance crown in almost area it’s competing in"
    Should this be:
    "With AMD taking the performance crown in almost every area it’s competing in" ... missing every?
  • charlesg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Now to just find the 5950 in stock at NewEgg!
  • faizoff - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Quick question on encoding with Handbrake, the 4k encoding and even the others for that matter, what preset are they run? like fast, medium, slow? and what RF count are the encodes set to? Sorry if I missed those, don't see them at a glance. Amazing review as always. Best tech deep dive for me, I love to read the architectural breakdown.
  • GeoffreyA - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    I think AT is using Handbrake's presets: (a) Discord Nitro 480p30, (b) Vimeo YouTube 720p30, and (c) HEVC 2160p60. I went through them now and here are the settings:

    A) Medium, CRF = 21
    B) Medium, CRF = 22
    C) Slow, CRF = 24

    If you were looking for the reference frames, they are 3, 1, and 4. And there's a possibility Anandtech might have altered the presets.
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Does Purch require you to use at least one bad pun in every article?

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