How to fix lag in Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 is experiencing some serious lag spikes on launch day.

Borderlands 3 is pretty laggy. Here are some quick solutions that might help.

It’s launch day for Borderlands 3 when all the bugs come crawling out of the code to stutter your game to a grinding halt. The official Reddit bug report thread is alive and well with the songs of forlorn gamers, hoping for fixes to the ever-present launch day glitches.

One of the top complaints is lag, and it’s especially prevalent in the split screen co-op mode. With no official solution offered at this time, there are a few general lag fixes we can offer, similarly to the DotEsports fixes for Fortnite. They are both Epic Games, after all.

Lag or Frame Drops?

When someone says lag, they might mean the frames are dropping suddenly. The frames per second determine how smoothly something runs. If you’re looking at something and it seems like a stop motion animation, or your character is still moving, but it moves slowly through the animation cycle, you’re likely dealing with frame drops.

Frame drops are a tricky beast. It could be the computer performing poorly, or it could be something to do with the game itself. The first thing to try is a restart. It’s a simple thing to try. Restart the game and if that doesn’t work, then try restarting your computer. It’s the “did you try turning it off and back on again?” solution.

If that doesn’t work, check some graphics drivers for updates. Often companies release new drivers to go with big-name games and optimize performance.

Finally, check your computer’s performance specs. Perhaps it just can’t run it very well. Bring your graphics settings down a little if you have weak frames.

If none of this works and your computer is still struggling but should be able to run it smoothly, it’s probably the game and patiently waiting for a patch with some lower graphics settings will give you a temporary fix.

It’s definitely frames:

Alright, you know it’s not your frames dropping. It’s definitely input lag, and you’re playing online. First thing you should do is change your region from automatic to the closest possible region.

Try the same “turn it off and back on again” method on the router. A restart might help speed things up. The same goes for restarting your game in the case of lag instead of frame drops. A fresh restart often helps.

These are only a few suggestions that might help while Gearbox works on all the solutions. We know many of the issues are within the code itself, appearing across all platforms. Try these and hope for a quick bandaid solution until the hotfixes are out.