One of 2025's largest upcoming games is Borderlands 4 — the next mainline entry in Gearbox Software's long-running, highly popular co-op looter shooter franchise, and also its first game since 2022's Tiny Tina's Wonderlands spinoff. With an entirely new planet, story, colossal arsenal of guns to collect, and cast of Vault Hunters, it has the potential to be one of the year's best games. But tragically, over half of the entire userbase on the PC gaming platform Steam may not even be able to play it.
That revelation came when Borderlands 4's price was finally revealed on Monday, as its PC system requirements were listed on Steam at the same time. The minimum requirements in general are quite demanding — notably, you'll need at least NVIDIA's RTX 2070 or AMD's RX 5700 XT for your GPU, along with 16GB of RAM and 100GB of SSD space — but the real killer is the minimum demand for a CPU with eight cores or more.
Most popular budget-friendly processors frequently used in gaming PC builds only have six cores instead of eight or more. In fact, according to Steam's recent May hardware survey, a whopping 50.39% of Steam users have a chip with six cores or fewer. This means that effectively over half of the players on the world's most popular PC gaming client won't be able to run Borderlands 4 at its lowest settings.
This naturally won't be a problem for anyone gaming on a higher end system outfitted with a top-notch CPU, but for tons of players using budget or even mid-range rigs, there's a fairly high chance they'll need to make a processor upgrade just to get Borderlands 4 to properly boot up.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
OS: | Windows 10 / Windows 11 | Windows 10 / Windows 11 |
Processor: | Intel Core i7-9700 / AMD Ryzen 7 2700X | Intel Core i7-12700 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X |
Memory: | 16 GB RAM | 32 GB RAM |
Graphics: | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT |
Storage: | 100 GB available space | 100 GB available space |
Additional Notes: | Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system. Requires 8 CPU Cores for processor. Requires 8 GB VRAM for graphics. SSD storage required | Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system. Requires 8+ CPU Cores for processor. Requires 12+ GB VRAM for graphics. SSD storage required |
As for why Borderlands 4 has a CPU requirement this high and demanding requirements in general, it's impossible to say for sure. However, it is using Unreal Engine 5 for advanced visual quality and rendering techniques, and with how action-packed and chaotic Borderlands can get with dozens upon dozens of enemies on-screen, I'm not surprised it will be CPU intensive. With that said, though, plenty of other AAA 2025 games can be played with six-core chips at the minimum level and have lower requirements overall.
The good news? Borderlands 4 isn't scheduled to release until September 12, so there's still plenty of time to find a good deal on components if you need to upgrade in order to meet the game's eight-core CPU requirement or any other. In fact, Amazon Prime Day is coming up in early July, so your best bet will be to wait for its deals and take advantage of the best ones offered.
Still, it's disappointing that tons of PC gamers will likely need to make upgrades just to play Borderlands 4 at its lowest spec. Hopefully the highly anticipated co-op shooter is worth upgrading for, in the end.
Borderlands 4 is scheduled to release on September 12, 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2 for $69.99. The Deluxe Edition is priced at $99.99, while the most expensive version, the Super Deluxe Edition, clocks in at $129.99.
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