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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  • 29a - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    No iGPU tests?
  • Alistair - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Quote from Ars Technia: Rocket Lake-S gets a small but noticeable upgrade to its integrated graphics performance—the 10th-generation Core CPU's UHD 630 graphics gets bumped up to UHD 750. While it is an improvement, it's nothing to write home about—if you were hoping for an equivalent to Intel's Iris Xe graphics in Tiger Lake laptop CPUs (or AMD's Vega 11 in desktop APUs) you'll be sorely disappointed.

    A modest GeForce GTX 1060 is good for a Time Spy Graphics score of roughly 4,000. Intel's flagship i7-1185G7 laptop CPU manages nearly half that at 1572, with AMD's Vega 11 lagging noticeably behind at 1226. Rocket Lake-S' UHD 750 comes in at a yawn-inducing 592—a little less than half the performance of Vega 11 and a little more than one-third the performance of Iris Xe.
  • KaarlisK - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Also, notice that i5 11400 has UHD Graphics 730, which has less EUs (24 not 32). So with the cheapest i5 (10400->11400) there may actually be a regression in iGPU performance.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Sounds like even on as advanced a process as 14nm+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ that yields aren't exactly that spectacular then for this backport.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Well density definitely isn't.
  • III-V - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Why in the world would you come to that conclusion?
  • firewolfsm - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    Because Intel generally hasn't had to cut the IGP for i5 models in the past. The cut indicates they're producing chips with bad EUs.
  • KaarlisK - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    In the past, they could offload half-funcioning GPUs to Pentiums and Celerons. There are no Rocket Lake i3s even...
  • Alistair - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    I was bored, so I went and bought the i5-11500 just to test Intel Xe haha. I'll post benchmarks later.
  • Alistair - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Ok it gets ~40 fps in Overwatch at 1080p, and ~100fps at 50 percent of 1080p (scaling at higher resolutions is bad with DDR memory). Ouch. Not great. Usable, but not great. This is with very fast memory. DDR4 3600 C16.

    Now I'm going to try Runeterra.

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