Borderlands 4 isn’t coming out until September, but it finally got its pre-order status with an update on the 16th of June. Not only did that reveal the price of the game, but also the system requirements. These are quite the challenging targets for anyone wanting to play the game, and a lot more modern compared to the previous entry in the franchise. For starters, it requires a ray tracing-capable graphics card and an 8-core CPU.

The system requirements visible on Steam are a big ask considering what gamers actually have. Budget CPUs are crucial in building out gaming PCs, but the most popular ones don’t meet that need, like the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, which only has six cores. The same goes for all its predecessors, too.

According to the recent Steam Hardware survey, 50.42% of users have a six-core CPU or lower. This means that more than half of Steam players don’t meet the Borderlands 4 minimum system requirements.

Borderlands 4 system requirements and why they might be so high

Borderlands 4 is built on the latest Unreal Engine 5, integrating hardware ray tracing and some rather impressive graphics features. It does take some power to run it. This is probably why it also requires a graphics card with 8GB of VRAM, and even though these days that might seem low, we’re talking about the minimum requirements here. We saw the same 8GB requirement in the recently released Doom: The Dark Ages.

Especially when it comes to Borderlands fans, considering what it took to run the game previously. Borderlands 3 only required an AMD FX-835 or Intel i5-3570 processor and a Radeon HD 7970 or GTX 680 GPU. That game was only released back in 2019, so now in 2025, those requirements are an i7-9700/Ryzen 7 2700X with RTX 2070/RX 5700 XT.

Two spin-offs have been released since then: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and New Tales from the Borderlands, both of which have modest requirements of their own. Both recommend the (six-core) AMD Ryzen 5 2600 and GTX 1060 6GB, for example.

Going back to Borderlands 4, when it comes to the recommended hardware, it gets a lot more mid-range. Jumping up to more modern i7-12700 and Ryzen 7 5800X alongside an RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT. Asking for more than eight cores and 12GB of VRAM excludes a significant portion of the user base and is rather expensive these days.

About the Author

Sebastian Kozlowski

With a fascination for technology and games, Seb is a tech writer with a focus on hardware, news, and deals. He is also a tester and reviewer for the site. Contact him @ [email protected]