Little Wonderland Tina’s Benchmark

With Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, the eponymous character from the world of Borderlands gets her own solo show. The game is a classic Borderlands game with an interesting narrative scenario. This technology is based on Borderlands 3, but delivers different results than the original results in the test.

Borderlands 3 (Test) Not followed by Borderlands 4, but with Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a spin-off that focuses on the namesake character from the Borderlands universe. And since Tiny Tina plays D&D in Wonderland, there are some narrative and gameplay twists that are a little different from the Borderlands universe.

Tiny Tina offers decent graphics

Technically, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands takes Borderlands 3 as its skeleton, keeping the series’ comic book style while improving the graphics quality slightly. There are some extra details that can be seen all over the place in the new title, but there aren’t any major changes. But this is not particularly bad, because the graphics simply fit the game.

Of course, the game could have taken it one step further visually, but it’s definitely not a graphical hit. Overall, it’s still a great title, and the comic book style helps in that regard. However, the developers of Gearbox should improve the graphics quality for the fourth part of Borderlands.

Apart from DirectX 12 and CAS, there are hardly any features

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is again using Unreal Engine 4 as the graphics engine, and the primary API is DirectX 12. Alternatively, you can switch to DirectX 11 in the graphics menu. AMD’s FidelityFX CAS is used on a PC with a sharpness filter that can be turned on and off, but it’s not more precisely configured. There is no ray tracing, same goes for upscaling technologies like AMD FSR or Nvidia DLSS.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands shows a good graphics menu on PC, although there is still room for improvement. In addition to the classic graphics presets and individual options, there is an FPS limiter that can be set to 30, 60 or 120 frames per second. Alternatively, frame rates that deviate from the three values ​​can be configured in increments of 1 fps in the range between 15 and 300 fps.

There is also in-game downsampling, even if the display resolution only works with the fixed values ​​of 50, 75, 125, 150, 175, and 200 percent. Subtle gradation can be useful, especially when upgrading, since pixel loss is already high even at 75 percent.

In addition, the sharpening filter can be turned on or off using AMD FidelityFX CAS, i.e. it cannot be configured more precisely. Last but not least, there is a built-in performance meter that plays a fast sequencing. On the other hand, there are no screenshots of the individual options on board and the descriptions of the samples are simple.

Six game presets with greater impact

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands offers six different graphics presets: ‘Ultra Low’, ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’, ‘Ultra’ and ‘Badass’, with ‘Badass’ also being the ultimate graphic detail. Returning to “Ultra” he finds only slight differences even with the magnifying glass. With “Badass” the shadows look a little better at medium and long distances, because they lose detail a little with the “Ultra”. However, there do not seem to be any other differences.

This then changes with ‘High’, because larger cuts compared to ‘Ultra’ can be seen here. The width of the vegetation is literally shortened to “high” even at medium distances, which is immediately noticeable. In addition, shadows and ambient occlusion are reduced, which are barely noticeable on some objects but look noticeably worse on others.

From the middle preset there are significant savings, both vegetation and shadows are significantly reduced. It also results in weaker smoothing and a sharper image. From the low preset, vegetation is largely missing, the same goes for shadows and object detail on top of this object is lost. Including the “High” graphics preset, graphics in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands can thus be reduced with moderate visual effects. From the “intermediate” level, a lot of detail is lost.

Big differences between AMD and Nvidia

AMD and Nvidia graphics cards sometimes react very differently to the graphics presets in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. If you switch the badass preset to “Ultra” with a GeForce RTX 3080, you’ll get a 5 percent fps rate. The Radeon RX 6800 XT, on the other hand, is 10 percent. The higher preset, which is still graphically decent, brings another 16 percent on GeForce and 20 percent on Radeon.

With the middle preset, performance increases dramatically and this also applies to the difference between an Ampere graphics card and RDNA 2. With medium settings, the GeForce RTX 3080 increases by 56 percent compared to “high,” while the Radeon RX 6800 XT increases by 80 percent. Changing the Low and Ultra Low settings is again better on an AMD GPU, but the differences are much smaller.