Battleborn: Recommended GPUs, CPUs, & Graphical Settings Guide

Battleborn is one of Borderlands developer Gearbox’s less successful ventures, and it was little surprise when it was announced back in 2019 that the game would be shutting down. The official end is coming later this month, and if you ever wanted to see the game first-hand, this is your final chance: Battleborn will be completely unplayable once the servers are shut off.

Recommended GPUs for Battleborn

As we stated in the bolded note in the above section, we are currently not recommending AMD GPUs for Battleborn until the many reports of unacceptable performance are resolved. As a result, all of our GPU recommendations are for NVIDIA cards for the time being.

For Medium or High settings at 1080p, we recommend at least the GTX 1050. For a little extra money, the GTX 1050 Ti would be even better choices in this range.

Ensuring a constant 60+ FPS on Ultra settings at 1080p, we’ll upgrade to the GTX 1060 3GB. At 1440p, we recommend the GTX 1070.

Recommended CPUs for Battleborn

The CPU is an important component for Battleborn, but the game does not have particularly high demands.

For playing Battleborn above 1440p, we recommend at least a mid-range CPU, such as the i5-8400 or the R5 2600.

Battleborn Graphical Settings Guide

Battleborn features 20 graphical settings that you can tweak to achieve optimal performance for your PC. Some of those settings have a greater impact on performance than others.

Overall, available benchmarks have shown that raising Battleborn’s graphical settings from Low to Ultra will cause a performance impact of roughly 33%, which is not as big of a performance difference as we see in most PC games.

We plan to update this guide once the game is released we can independently benchmark various graphical settings in Battleborn. Until then, let’s discuss two graphical settings that typically have a high impact on performance in games:

Texture Quality: This setting ranges from Low to Ultra High, and affects the detail of the game’s textures, which cover the character models and environment. Higher-resolution textures demand more VRAM from your graphics card. If your card cannot provide sufficient RAM, the game’s performance will take a severe hit.

Ambient Occlusion: This setting adds more detailed shading to the game’s environment. It can make the game look more detailed and full, but it can also cause a big hit to performance—especially in forested areas. If you’re looking to lower settings, experiment with disabling Ambient Occlusion and see if you can still enjoy the game’s visuals.

If Battleborn is not performing to your level of satisfaction on your system, adjusting these two settings will likely make an impact on the game’s performance.

Why Battleborn failed

The reasons each player had for why Battleborn failed were similar in a multitude of ways. The game was too hard for people to learn, it didn’t have much of a player base to begin with, it got old quickly, and the matchmaking services either took way too long or didn’t work all together.

Even through all of those complaints, one main reason came up over and over: Overwatch.

Overwatch released on May 24th, 2016, just three weeks after Battleborn, to an outstanding reception and a large, rapidly growing playerbase.

“[Gearbox] released things too early and there were bugs and problems all over the place and they never got ahead of it and ended up getting smacked by Overwatch,” Lichtman said.

Battleborn (2K Games) on the left, Overwatch (Activision Blizzard) on the right.
Not all players blame Overwatch’s success for Battleborn’s failure. Kiss thinks pointing to Overwatch as the main culprit is a “convenient answer.” He blames Gearbox. From the beginning, Kiss thought Battleborn wasn’t marketed well enough. The word didn’t really get out.

On an October 2019 podcast, Battleborn’s creative director Randy Varnell said that, based on rumored figures, Blizzard spent more money just on marketing for Overwatch than Gearbox spent on the entire development of Battleborn.

Gearbox was also working on the next big game in its extremely popular Borderlands franchise when Battleborn was released. As an online game, players expected updates and changes to Battleborn, but some felt Gearbox was too busy with Borderlands.

Lichtman said he definitely saw a correlation between the release of Borderlands 3 and the reasons for the announcement that the game was dying.

“When Borderlands 3 released their first big patch the Battleborn servers were down for two or three weeks,” Lichtman said. “It was not a coincidence. I filed a ticket with 2K and they were like, ‘Is your internet down?’ I said, ‘No, this is not a coincidence.’ Then when they released their second patch, the game went down again and then like two days after that, they were just like, ‘Yeah, we are just going to shut down the game.’”

Is Battleborn unplayable?

The game will be unplayable as of January 25, 2021, when the servers shut down, including any single-player options. “Once the servers are offline,” publisher 2K explains, “Battleborn won’t be playable in any way.” If you don’t already own it, the only way to pick up the game would be through a physical copy – the game was removed from digital storefronts in November 2019, and its microtransaction currency was disabled in February 2020.

The PC version of Battleborn currently has about nine players, according to SteamDB, so it’s not looking like there’ll be a robust community shedding tears here. But it’s still distressing to see a piece of gaming history, however small, disappear entirely.

Perhaps the real hobby-grade future for Battleborn will come when a group of enterprising modders figure out how to get the game working again in another decade.

Is Battleborn still playable?

The end of the road has arrived for Gearbox Software’s adventure shooter Battleborn, as every part of the game has now been rendered unplayable.

Why did Battleborn fail?

The reasons each player had for why Battleborn failed were similar in a multitude of ways. The game was too hard for people to learn, it didn’t have much of a player base to begin with, it got old quickly, and the matchmaking services either took way too long or didn’t work all together.

Can you play Battleborn 2021?

The official end is coming later this month, and if you ever wanted to see the game first-hand, this is your final chance: Battleborn will be completely unplayable once the servers are shut off. Battleborn will be unplayable as of January 25, 2021, when the servers shut down, including any single-player options.

Is Battleborn ever coming back?

Will Battleborn Come Back? After Gearbox Software and 2K Games shut down the servers for Battleborn, fans are asking if there is a possibility for the game to return or if there will ever be a sequel. Currently, there haven’t been any announcements.