Borderlands 4 Quietly Loses Denuvo, but Credit the FPS Boost With Care
Borderlands 4 on PC appears to have dropped Denuvo anti-tamper with update 1.11, released on October 22, 2026. Neither 2K Games nor Gearbox announced it, and the patch notes do not mention Denuvo. The game launched on September 11, 2025, which means the protection lasted roughly 13 months.
The evidence so far
The change was spotted by dataminers and content creators, including EpicNNG, who also works on the fan project restoring the cancelled Borderlands Online. SteamDB's build history shows Borderlands4.exe shrinking by about 171.69 MB after the patch, and files tied to the anti-tamper layer are gone.
The evidence is strong but circumstantial. When the first reports came out, the Steam store page still listed Denuvo as third-party DRM. A cracked copy of the game surfaced online shortly after the update. Also worth noting: according to EpicNNG, 2K's own DRM system, Symbiote, is still in place.
Did performance really improve?
The headline number comes from EpicNNG: at 1440p with medium settings, frame rates went from around 50 to 70–80 FPS. That is a single user report, not a controlled benchmark, and there are good reasons to treat it with caution.
| Factor | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Update 1.11 lists stability and performance optimizations | Some or all of the gain may come from the patch itself |
| The previous build is no longer available on Steam | A clean before-and-after test on the same PC is hard to run |
| Some players still report severe frame-rate dips | Results depend heavily on the system |
| Earlier PC Games Hardware tests found Denuvo cost up to about 5% in CPU-bound scenes | That is in the range of a driver or BIOS update |
So the game may well run smoother after 1.11, but pinning the whole improvement on Denuvo is not supported by the data available today.
What hardware Borderlands 4 needs
Performance complaints have followed the PC version since launch, with players pointing at both Unreal Engine 5 and Denuvo. The official 2K specs are demanding. The minimum calls for an 8-core CPU such as the Intel Core i7-9700 or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, a GeForce RTX 2070, Radeon RX 5700 XT or Intel Arc A580 with 8 GB of VRAM, 16 GB of RAM and a 100 GB SSD. The recommended tier moves up to a Core i7-12700 or Ryzen 7 5800X, a GeForce RTX 3080, Radeon RX 6800 XT or Arc B580, and 32 GB of RAM.
How to test the patch on your PC
The best way to judge the patch is to benchmark your own system: pick a familiar scene and log average FPS and 1% lows. The game supports DLSS, FSR, XeSS and TSR upscaling, frame generation and NVIDIA Reflex, which can recover a lot of headroom.
If your CPU has fewer than eight cores or your GPU has less than 8 GB of VRAM, though, a patch will not close the gap. In that case, it makes sense to look at HYPERPC gaming PCs or spec out your own machine in the HYPERPC configurator.
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