Borderlands 3 crashing startup July 2020 update

I've been getting this the past few times I started Borderlands 3. It shows the logo screens, it says "Optimizing Shaders" then this appears and it closes. I've tried restarting my computer (this time it wouldn't restart even when I left it on overnight. I had to hold the power button). Admittedly I'm running a very old rig from 2013 so that may be part of it.

Samsung Series 7 Gamer; Windows 10 64-bit Home; 24GB DDR3 RAM; System Model: 700G7C; BIOS: P02ABA.041.130320.DK; Processor: Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.4GHz; DirectX Version: 12; Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7870M, AMD Radeon Graphics Processor (0x6825), Internal DAC(400MHz), VRAM: 2026 MB, DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration, AGP Texture Acceleration.

technical-issues borderlands-3

Best Answer

I ran into a similar error when my power cut out during the shaders being updated. My error included the message:

Lowlevelfatalerror line 242

I found a solution by Dirges on the Gearbox Forums. The cause of this crash is a bad or corrupt .ini file that Borderlands 3 can't process. To fix it, try this:

Find where your Borderlands 3 config exists. Mine was at <username>\Documents\My Games\Borderlands 3\Saved\Config
Delete (or rename) the folder WindowsNoEditor which contains a bunch of .ini files. This will force Borderlands 3 to rebuild the .ini files.
It appears that the most common reason for these kinds of errors is bad DX11/12 support. You can try to inspect or edit the GameUserSettings.ini file to update the PreferredGraphicsAPI to DX11 or DX12 as your graphics card supports.