Here's how to improve Borderlands 4 performance on consoles

Borderlands 4 released with shaky performance at best on PC, but now reports indicate that PC isn't the only platform suffering from performance problems; both consoles are as well.

The tech experts over at Digital Foundry discovered that Borderlands 4's performance dwindles over time on all consoles, particularly in the 60FPS performance modes. By comparison, the Quality modes, which restrict the game to 30FPS, hold up better for continuous play, but are still at risk of the performance decline if the game is played for long enough.

What is happening exactly? Digital Foundry found that when in Performance mode, Borderlands 4's performance begins to decline over the course of about one hour, which, when exceeded, will result in the average FPS dropping from the target 60FPS down to the mid-40s. Why does this happen? Currently, there isn't any official explanation as to why performance declines over time, but Digital Foundry's leading theory is that there is some kind of memory leak that becomes more prominent over time.

How to fix performance. The issue has been officially recognized by Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox Software's CEO Randy Pitchford, who wrote on X on September 16, "Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 Pro after several hours of continuous play. Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!"

Digital Foundry can confirm that quitting the game and reloading the save file will resolve the performance issue, which supports the prevailing theory that a memory leak is a result of the deteriorating performance. When the game is quit, the memory is refreshed, freeing up performance headroom, and enabling that 60FPS target to be hit. However, this hasn't been officially confirmed by Gearbox.

So, if you are on console and want to feel that smooth 60FPS, you will need to restart Borderlands 4 until Gearbox rolls out a patch that fixes the issue.