Borderlands 2 — Tips & Tricks
Practical Borderlands 2 tips that also keep your install stable and your saves safe.
Last updated 2026-09-25 · evergreen reference
The tips here are chosen because they prevent problems as well as improve play: options that avoid crashes, habits that protect saves, and settings that are worth changing before you ever need a fix.
Tips worth knowing
Each one changes something real in Borderlands 2.
On AMD cards, turn PhysX off or to Low
Borderlands 2 can run PhysX without an NVIDIA GPU, but the work falls back to the CPU and performs poorly at Medium or High. Off or Low is the practical choice on Radeon hardware.
NVIDIA users: Medium is the sweet spot
High adds visible cloth, debris and fluid effects but punishes minimum frame rates exactly when barrels explode and slag stacks up. Medium keeps most of the look.
Drop PhysX before you drop textures
Texture quality is usually safe to keep high if you have the VRAM — it is far less likely to cause frame drops than PhysX or post-processing.
For high refresh rates, be conservative
Cap slightly below the monitor refresh rate, disable VSync if you use adaptive sync, and keep PhysX at Low or off unless you have substantial spare GPU capacity.
At 4K, protect resolution clarity
Run High textures and filtering, then scale back ambient occlusion, shadows and PhysX until combat stays stable. Dropping to 900p or 720p helps more than lowering textures on weak hardware.
Habits that save you later
Do these once and stop thinking about them.
Back up your saves
Before any reinstall, driver sweep or mod change, copy the save folder for Borderlands 2. Cloud saves are convenient but they can also sync a corrupted file back onto your machine — knowing where the local copy lives is what actually protects you.
Write down what you changed
Launch options, config file edits and INI tweaks are easy to forget. A short note means you can undo a change six months later instead of reverse-engineering your own setup.
Benchmark one repeatable spot
Pick a demanding area in Borderlands 2, load the same save and play for the same duration after each change. Judging performance by feel is how people conclude a real improvement did nothing.
Windows-level changes that apply everywhere
Not specific to this game, and worth doing once.
Disable fullscreen optimizations and fix DPI
Right-click the Borderlands 2 executable, open the Compatibility tab, tick Disable fullscreen optimizations, then open Change high DPI settings and set the scaling override to Application. This resolves black screens, low-resolution output and alt-tab freezes across a large number of Unreal Engine 3 and older DirectX 11 titles.
Turn off Game Bar, Game Mode and background recording
All three sit in Settings > Gaming. They cost RAM and GPU resources and interfere with fullscreen rendering. Some newer titles do benefit from Game Mode, so test rather than assuming — but start with it off.
Use a high-performance power plan and watch thermals
Balanced and silent profiles let the CPU and GPU downclock under load. Select High or Ultimate Performance, and monitor temperatures — crashes that appear ten minutes in rather than at launch are very often thermal rather than software.
Keep the page file system-managed
Several engines rely on virtual memory even with ample RAM, and disabling the page file is a recurring cause of "out of memory" errors on machines with 32 GB installed. Leave Windows in control of it.
Related pages
This is an independent player reference and is not official documentation for Borderlands 2. GameFixPro does not host or link to copyrighted assets. Modding guidance is for single-player use only — never use mods in online multiplayer. Verify current requirements, prices and policies with the publisher before acting.