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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  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link

    It’s clearly sarcasm. The Turing stuff, which was a poor value even before this latest mining fiasco is very expensive at its top end — putting it quite outside the budget of a lot of people — that is if they could even get their hands on one in the first place.
  • Qasar - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    maybe you should stop whining and just leave if AT makes you this unhappy, and angry, oxford guy
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 1, 2021 - link

    When this becomes your personal website then you can decide who is to be censored and who is not. Until then, keep your comments relevant.
  • Qasar - Thursday, April 1, 2021 - link

    right after you do
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link

    And look up the tu quoque fallacy.
  • Qasar - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link

    whining and complaining is still the same, no matter how you look at it, again, if this site makes you that unhappy and angry, due to the way they test and review products, then why do you keep coming here ?
  • zamroni - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    it's should be called rocket lame.
    it runs hot like rocket too
  • SkyBill40 - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Tech Jesus said it best and most bluntly: A waste of silicon.
  • SystemsBuilder - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Ian,
    your writing about how "hard" AVX-512 is to program was fine in the first article and maybe even in the second article you wrote, but you keep on repeating the exact same sentence (paragraph) on how hard AVX-512 is to program and keep on quoting Jim Keller: "there are only a couple dozen or so people who understand how to extract the best performance ...".
    That was a while ago and I can assure you there are plenty of people who know how to do this now. It's assembly and any CS/CE major graduate worth their salt, with linear algebra (vector calculus also helps), advanced computer architecture and a serious parallel programming class would know how to do that with some work.
    AVX-512 is not mysterious or strange, it's just vectors math + vectorization of normal scalar operations on configurable 512 bit vectors. Yes you do need to vectorize your algorithms from the ground up because you cannot rely on compilers to vectorize your old sequential scalar algorithms for you (they'll do some attempts, but will disappoint), and you do need to write some code in either assembly directly or using intrinsic, as well as understand pipeline and scheduling of the AVX-512 instructions and the dependencies (there are tools to help you with this too), BUT it's not harder than that. It's not magic. It’s just normal solid Computer Science work. Can you please change the narrative on AVX-512 hardness because I think it is just misleading today 2021, having been available in mainstream CPUs since Skylake-X was released. Thx.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Haha. No. Ian is absolutely right and big names in the industry (like Linus Torvalds) are mostly in agreement on this too: AVX-512 hides the the warts of the underlying performance discrepancies of their hardware when doing general everyday compute.

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