Borderlands 4 might’ve dropped with solid reviews and a lot of anticipation, but Xbox players are starting to notice a particularly annoying performance issue — the longer you play, the worse the game runs.
What’s going wrong?
Since its launch on Xbox less than a week ago, numerous players have flocked to Reddit and social media to report a strange progression of performance degradation. Basically, the game’s framerate and responsiveness reportedly start to dip the longer a single gaming session goes on. That means you could jump into Borderlands 4 on your Xbox Series X|S and everything feels great — silky smooth, high frame rate, snappy combat — but after a couple of hours? Lag, stutters, maybe even a fuzzy bit of screen tearing creeping in.
The issue seems to develop gradually and isn’t obvious in short sessions, which may explain why initial reviews didn’t catch it. In fact, early frame-rate tests done by numerous outlets saw perfectly solid performance across all modes on Xbox consoles … but you have to really sink your teeth into the game for the problem to rear its head.
What’s the temporary fix?
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford chimed in on Twitter, suggesting a super simple but very telling workaround: just relaunch the game.
If you’re experiencing performance degradation during extended play sessions, a quick relaunch of the game may restore normal performance.
It’s the kind of fix that implies some kind of memory leak or resource accumulation is happening under the hood during extended gameplay. Pitchford briefly mentioned the PS5 Pro in his post as well, but the bulk of complaints are sitting squarely with Xbox Series X and Series S users.
This isn’t affecting everyone
To be fair, it’s not universal. Some players have put in marathon sessions with no hiccups whatsoever. If that’s you? Keep grinding. No need to panic. But for those running into serious dips in performance after an hour or two, restarting the game might be your best bet — at least until Gearbox puts out a proper patch.
Reddit user Nep6qcm mentioned a similar experience on the r/Xbox subreddit, highlighting that performance starts fine and slowly degrades, forcing players to reboot if they want to return to a playable state.
What we’re hoping for
Clearly, this isn’t ideal. Regular restarts aren’t exactly what you’d expect from a major AAA release in 2025. And right now, there’s no official ETA on a fix from Gearbox. In the short term, the workaround works — but long term, fans will be expecting a patch that addresses the memory or rendering issues directly.
Until then, keep an eye on session length and maybe add “restart game” to your loot farming routine. Don’t worry — you’re not alone, and it’s not just your console.
Performance degradation over time is one of the more frustrating bugs because it isn’t immediately noticeable. But once you start replaying the same mission twice and dropping frames like loot, you know something’s off.