Borderlands 4 patch backfires as players report an increase in stuttering after update

Gearbox Software released an update for Borderlands 4 on September 25, which promised to fix stability and performance issues on PC, addressing various instances of hitching, low FPS, and crashes while promising further investigation for further tweaks. Instead, players have reported new stuttering issues after Borderlands 4’s patch dropped.

The patch introduced a few improvements, like an FOV slider for consoles, updates to characters for better animations, and fixes for black screens on Xbox and infinite loading screens during cross play sessions. However, rather than smoothing out Borderlands 4’s kinks, the patch amplified stuttering issues. Gearbox promptly issued a community post on the Borderlands support site and on X, acknowledging the problem.

In the post, Gearbox stated:

We’ve received reports from some players that, although the September 25th patch is intended to improve performance, they’re experiencing the opposite.

Workaround: The stuttering will resolve itself as shaders continue to compile in the background while playing. If you’re still experiencing stutters after 15 mins, you can clear your shader cache via your video card manufacturer’s approved method.

Gearbox has already provided the same solution earlier on Steam forums, advising players to wait out 15 minutes after changing their graphics settings to let shaders recompile before judging the game’s performance.

Shader compilation loading screens have become the norm for PC gamers in many Unreal Engine 5 games, including Borderlands 4. Players have to wait before spawning into the game world, as bypassing the compilation process can result in glitches.

These problems have piled up on Borderlands 4’s rocky reception on PC ever since its launch on September 12, 2025. The game currently holds a 62.69% “Mixed” user rating with a total of 57,793 reviews on Steam. Still, the game is holding up well with a daily average concurrent player count of 100,000 on the platform.

Players chasing fidelity have also been advised against playing the game on the ‘Badass graphics’ preset, which exacerbates frame drops and stuttering even on high-end rigs.

Vault hunters are looking for tweaks like experimenting with the GPU shader cache size or looting vaults before relaunching the game to smooth out the shader compilation problem. For those still mired by the 15-minute wait, Gearbox directs users to use the support ticket system.