Very low FPS in Borderlands 2?

Played co-op with my bro in Borderlands 2 for the first time in ages. He recently upgraded his desktop with a GTX 970 and an i5-4430. So not a huge difference from my GTX 980M and i7-4720HQ.

He managed to play the game buttery smooth but my game was extremely choppy - dropping down to 11FPS in places!

GPU-Z revealed the culprit was criminally low GPU usage - literally around 3-12% or so. CPU was running along at 3.5GHz - no throttling there. No idea how to solve this issue.

Any ideas? I have the latest GPU driver. PhysX set to run on the GPU.

 

Normal. It randomly does this. I experienced the same thing with Borderlands 2. It's not something you can fix; it just doesn't like some system configs. I'm sorry to bear the bad news.

 

Wow. But it's unplayable. There was a point where it was a literal slideshow (15-10fps for a prolonged period) and yet my bro's desktop was sailing along at a smooth 60fps.

What a joke. My 780M, heck even my 650M, played it consistently better than this!

 

Was this at a similar physx setting in game? One wasn't on low and the other on high? That makes a huge difference. I have also seen large FPS drops but it really shouldn't be THAT bad! Even on my 980m SLI rig I would see 30s and 40s occasionally on the latest game which was noticeable but still playable.

 

Both maxed out with PhysX set to high.

It's a UE3 engine game from 2012 :S

 

Dude try lowering the PhysX. When you, your co-ops, and multiple enemies start letting the elemental weapons fly, it is brutal on framerates.

I was surprised at how hard it hits my 980M. My 780M could only handle Low in the big gunfights.

 

Have you checked if you may be seeing some heat or power throttling on either the CPU or GPU?

 

I know it's unplayable. I used to drop to 20-25 often, especially in the wildlife preserve. Some random areas would cause the drop. My friend with a 680 had no issues. Me forcing to single 780M didn't help. Me setting PhysX to CPU didn't help. Even turning off PhysX didn't help. Nothing I did helped. The GPU util just dropped and that was that. End of.

It's one of those games that breaks randomly on random systems for no reason. Forced my CPU to max speeds, forced my GPU to max speeds, forced game to one card, forced game to both cards, turned off PhysX, set PhysX to CPU, all sorts of crap. Every time I looked around online, I would find random people peppered here and there that had issues. Nobody knew what the issues were for, and there is no fix, and Borderlands The Pre Sequel did it out of the gate with many users.

Let me actually clarify this. My GTX 280M on max (no physX) graphics did BETTER than my GTX 780M SLI on max (no PhysX). There is no other reason for it other than the game is borked.

 

Yeah game is definitely broken. I can run it between 20 to 96fps. I had to turn off physics to low, and even then, at times, it might run bad, then recover. My GPU usage is only like 50% at best. With physx on low, I can at least run between 50 to 96fps, which is much better, but still jarring.

 

Batman Arkham Knight runs much better. And that game was removed from sale. What a joke.

No heat throttling. CPU in 60's, GPU in 50's. All chugging along at maximum speed.

I loved this game back in the day. Such a shame

 

I'm going to play BL2 on max, for a couple hours, just to report my fps to you.

 

Play video games for science... that's my motto.

 

Okay so I set Fraps to time for 7200 seconds. I played through the first set of quests on Opportunity, a sprawling level with tons of explosions. I used nothing but corrosive and shock weapons, to keep the PhysX flying around

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
353706, 6405016, 0, 62, 55.223

Ignore the '0 min', as it registered consecutive zeros a few times during the test, might be loading screens.

I also recorded each individual frame, and the lowest legit frame that wasn't next to a loading segment was 20,21 for 2 frames, then bounced back up over 30.

 

You can download and view my min/ave/max, frametime, and frame-by-frame fps files here.

 

That's nice and all Kevin, but all it likely means is that you don't experience the issue we do. It's definitely random on what PC it'll affect someone on. Remember: my 280M with 1066MHz DDR3 RAM and an i7-950 at 3GHz performed better in some places than my 3.5GHz 4800MQ, 1600MHz DDR3 RAM and 780M SLI. I even forced the game to one card and it still did the issue.