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.

Gaming Tests: World of Tanks Gaming Tests: F1 2019
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  • Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    No, that's me
  • yeeeeman - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Ian, you need to buy some new servers for anandtech.com now that AMD has launched zen 3.
    The site is barely loading.
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    I wonder if they're still running on the last hardware upgrade Anand did.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Nah, we're a couple of generations past that now.
  • Phiro69 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    As far as I can tell, it's cloudfront having problems, not Anandtech's backend. I would be surprised if they aren't 100% cloud based at this point, too.
  • gagegfg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    This is what I expected from AMD, 10 years but it came !!
  • gagegfg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Athlon 64 X2 2005 = 15 años
  • Tomatotech - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    15 anuses? Surely it’s not *that* bad ;)
  • ahenriquedsj - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    In competitive games it is a massacre.
  • Double Trouble - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    What AMD has been able to achieve over the past few years is definitely impressive, and this 5000 series CPU set is excellent. However, I do wonder if climbing up the price / segment chart is going to take a toll. For me, I've upgraded 5 PC's from older CPU's to Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X because the price was very reasonable (about $170). With a minimum of $300 for the new 5600X, that's almost double the price, so I won't be buying any for a long time. The 5000 series is impressive, but not worth that kind of a steep price. I wonder if a lot of other buyers might be in the same boat.

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