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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  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link

    There is no x590 chipset coming. X570 is ryzen 5000s chipset.

    There's also this miracle fo technology, if you have a micro atx or full atx board, you can put in ADD IN CARDS. Amazing, right? So even if your board does not natively support 2.5G LAN you can add it for a low price, because 2.5G cards are relatively cheap.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link

    the x570 aorus master and msi x570 unify also have 2.5G lan. And surely there will be newer models next year with newer features and names, gotta keep the model churn going!
  • alhopper - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Ian and Andrei - 1,000 Thank Yous for this awesome article and you fine technical journalism. You guys did amazing work and we (the community) are fortunate to be the benefactors.
    Thanks again and keep up the Good Work (TM).
  • Rekaputra - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Wow this article it so comprehensive. Glad i always check anandtech for my reference in computing. I wonder how it stack againt threadripper on database or excel compute workload. I know these are desktop proc. But there is possibility use it for mini workstation for office stuff like accounting and development RDBMS as it is cheaper.
  • SkyBill40 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Once some availability comes back into play... my old and trusty FX 8350 is going to be retired. I've been waiting to rebuild for a long time now and the wait has clearly paid off regardless of how the is the end of the line for AM4 or well Ryzen 4 does next year. I could wait... but nah.
  • jcromano - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link

    I'm in a similar boat. I'm still running an i5-2500k from early 2011 (coming up on ten years, yikes), and I'll build a new rig, probably 5600X, when the processors become available. I fret a bit over whether I should wait for the next socket to arrive before taking the plunge, but given the infrequency with which I upgrade, I think it's likely that the next socket would also be obsolete by the time it mattered.
  • evilpaul666 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    I'd love to see some PS3 emulation testing added.
  • abufrejoval - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    Control flow integrity (or enforcement) seem to be in, and that was for me a major criterion for getting one (5800X scheduled to arrive tomorrow).

    But what about SEV or per-VM-encryption? From the hints I see this seems enabled in Intel's Tiger Lake and I guess the hardware would be there on all Zen 3 chiplets, but is AMD going to enable it for "consumer" platforms?

    With 8 or more cores around, there is plenty of reasons why people would want to run a couple of VMs on pretty much anything, from a notebook to a home entertainment/control system, even a gaming rig. And some of those VMs we'd rather have secure from phishing and trojans, right?

    Keeping this an EPIC-only or Pro-only feature would be a real mistake IMHO.

    BTW ordered ECC DDR4-3200 to go with it, because this box will run 24x7 and pushes a Xeon E3-1276 v3 into cold backup.
  • lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    Starting to feel like the platform is way too constrained just for the sake of all 6 APUs AMD has released (all with mediocre graphics and most with mediocre CPUs, no less). I hope AMD bifuricates and comes up with an in-between platform that supports ~32-40 CPU PCIe lanes and drops APUs. If APUs can't be on-time with everything else there's so little point.
  • 29a - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    "Firstly, because we need an AI benchmark, and a bad one is still better than not having one at all."

    Can't say I agree with that.

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