Borderlands 4 Handheld Performance Review

Introduction

The king of looter shooters returns. Six years after Borderlands 3 it might just be time for Borderlands 4 to devour all your free time with great gunplay, in-depth character builds, stylized graphics, cringe dialogue, bad jokes, and a massive open world beckoning you to delve in. If you can run the game, that is. You can experience Borderlands 4 solo or with up to three friends, exploring the world of Kairos while killing everything that moves and trying to score that perfect legendary drop.

The latest Borderlands game is built on Unreal Engine 5. This entry keeps the series’ signature cell-shaded art style but introduces dynamic global illumination in the form of Lumen (software ray tracing version only), improved visuals, and an open-world design that replaces previous entries’ relatively large, but contained maps. The game supports every major upscaler as well as frame generation for NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs.

This handheld performance review will analyze the performance of Borderlands 4 on the two most popular PC handhelds around, Valve’s Steam Deck and ASUS’ ROG Ally X. You’ll also get optimized settings for both devices (well, one, but more on that later), and see how the game looks with said optimized settings.