Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox has asked PC gamers to wait 15 minutes for shaders to compile in the background while playing after some said this week’s update had caused increased stuttering.
The update, released September 25 (check out the patch notes here), was meant to improve Borderlands 4’s high-profile performance issues on PC, but soon after it rolled out, some players complained about stuttering.
Borderlands 4 is still on a mixed Steam review rating, with most of the negative comments revolving around PC performance. The tech experts at Digital Foundry have said their initial analysis of Borderlands 4 on PC showed significant stutter problems, and advised against running the game on its ‘Badass’ graphics setting.
Responding to the increased stutter issues reported by PC gamers, Gearbox issued a statement on social media, below, calling on players to give the looter shooter 15 minutes of gameplay to continue to compile shaders in the background, by which time those stuttering issues should resolve. If that doesn’t work, Gearbox suggested manually clearing your shader cache via your video card manufacturer’s approved method. And, if all else fails, Gearbox pointed to its support ticket process.
We’ve received reports that some players are experiencing reduced stability after downloading today’s update.
Stuttering issues should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile in the background while playing. If you’re still experiencing issues after 15 minutes of…
— Borderlands (@Borderlands) September 25, 2025
As anyone who’s played Borderlands 4 on PC knows, when you first boot up the game you must wait for shaders to compile before you spawn into the virtual world. But this process doesn’t appear to catch all the shader compilation that might have to be done during gameplay, causing stutter. At least, that’s the running theory.
Gearbox’s latest statement echoes previous advice it issued on Steam that to me read like an effort to prevent players from making knee-jerk reactions to the game’s performance as soon as they changed their settings: “Please note that any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile. Please keep playing for at least 15 minutes to see how your PC’s performance has changed.” This latest advice reads much the same to me.
Meanwhile, some players are recommending traveling to certain zones in the game to brute force shaders to compile before moving on to what they actually want to do in-game.
To expand on this: quit the game once after launching and relaunch it. Now travel into a zone and back out (Idolator Sol’s or a Vault will work) this should compile a BUNCH of shaders and start improving the smoothness.
Shader compiling is rough.
— Ki11er Six (@Ki11ersix) September 25, 2025
If you are delving into Borderlands 4, don’t go without an updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
