Out of Memory Error in PC Games: It’s Usually Not Your RAM — Here’s the Real Fix

Blame falls on RAM first. A game crashes with an “out of memory” or “out of video memory” error, and the instinct is to assume the system is under-specced — not enough RAM, not enough VRAM, time to upgrade. On a rig with 32GB of system memory and an 8GB-plus graphics card, that assumption is usually wrong.

The real cause, in most of these crashes, is how Windows manages virtual memory — not how much physical memory you own. Below is the exact mechanism Microsoft’s own support documentation describes, a diagnostic table to identify which of four real causes is hitting your system, and the specific fix for each one, verified against Windows 11 (24H2) virtual memory settings and current Nvidia/AMD driver behavior as of September 2026.

Quick Fix Checklist

Work down this list in order — the first two items resolve the large majority of “out of memory” crashes on modern hardware.

1. Set the page file to a manual custom size (1.5× your installed RAM) instead of leaving it on “Automatic.”
2. Reinstall your GPU driver with a full Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) clean pass, not just “Check for updates.”
3. Update chipset and LAN/network drivers too — a leaking network driver eats memory the same way a GPU driver does.
4. Verify your actual VRAM allocation with GPU-Z instead of trusting Task Manager’s numbers.
5. Lower texture quality or resolution one notch if your hardware is genuinely under-specced for the game.
6. Check your CPU model — 13th/14th-gen Intel Core chips have a documented degradation issue that mimics an out-of-memory crash.
7. Restart after any virtual memory change. It does not take effect until the system reboots.

Why “Out of Memory” Hits PCs With Plenty of RAM and VRAM

Windows doesn’t track memory the way most players assume. What actually caps every running process is the system commit limit — physical RAM plus every page file combined, and the total memory every process has reserved can never exceed that number, no matter how much RAM is sitting idle at the moment of the crash. By default, the page file is set to “Automatic,” which starts small and grows on demand as commit charge climbs. That growth isn’t instant, and according to Microsoft’s own documented cause for this exact bug (KB4055223), if a game or driver requests memory faster than the page file can expand, Windows throws an out-of-memory error even though the drive has room to grow it further. That gap — not a lack of installed memory — is why a 32GB, high-end rig can crash from an OOM error that a modest budget build never triggers.

Task Manager actively misleads you when you go looking for confirmation. Its “Dedicated GPU memory” reading is pulled from VidMm, Windows’ internal video memory manager, and it’s a simplified, filtered figure — not the raw allocation your GPU driver is actually juggling. Games reserve VRAM well ahead of using it and hold onto that reservation without touching every byte every frame, so Task Manager can show gigabytes of headroom on a card that’s already allocated nearly all of it. I’ve watched this exact scenario play out on a high-end build running nothing heavier than the game itself and Discord: Task Manager kept reporting comfortable VRAM headroom right up to the crash. GPU-Z’s “Memory Used” sensor, which tracks total allocation across every process rather than Windows’ cleaned-up summary, told a completely different story.

Diagnose Your Cause First

The fix depends entirely on which of these four patterns matches your crash — applying the wrong one wastes time and, in the case of lowering settings on a page-file problem, actively hurts your visual quality for nothing.

If your system fits the first row — modern hardware, plenty of memory on paper, a crash that seems to come out of nowhere — start with the page file fix below before touching anything else.

Fix the Page File the Right Way (This Fixes Most Cases)

Microsoft’s own workaround for this exact failure is to take the page file off “Automatic” and size it manually:

1. Press Windows key + Pause/Break to open System Properties.
2. Select Advanced system settings, then Settings under the Performance section on the Advanced tab.
3. Open the Advanced tab in the Performance Options window and select Change under Virtual memory.
4. Clear the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox.
5. Select Custom size and set the initial size to 1.5× your installed RAM (in MB) — Microsoft’s own recommended ratio for resolving this failure.
6. Select OK and restart. If the error returns, increase the initial size further.

Here’s a genuine contradiction worth flagging rather than papering over: Nixxes’ official PC support documentation — the studio behind the Spider-Man, Horizon, and Death Stranding PC ports — recommends letting Windows manage the page file automatically, confirming the crash “can occur on systems with high-end hardware, when the Windows page file does not offer enough space to allocate VRAM budget.” Microsoft’s own KB4055223, cited above, says the opposite: automatic sizing is what causes the slow-growth allocation failure in the first place. Trust the manual, fixed-size fix here — it satisfies both descriptions of the problem (a page file that’s too small, and a page file too slow to grow), it’s fully reversible, and it’s the version Microsoft ships as the actual bug workaround rather than general guidance.

Hunt Down a Driver Memory Leak

If your crash gets worse the longer you play rather than happening at a predictable moment, you’re not looking at a sizing problem — you’re looking at a leak. As one Tom’s Hardware forum contributor put it while diagnosing an i9-14900K/RTX 4080/32GB system with this exact symptom: “Windows treats page file & RAM as memory. Drivers ask for memory and sometimes they don’t return it after they have finished with it.” That’s the mechanism — a driver requests memory, never releases it, and commit charge climbs toward the limit described above until something crashes.

Update your GPU driver with a full Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) clean pass rather than a standard driver update — DDU strips leftover files, folders, and registry keys a normal uninstall leaves behind, which matters because a corrupted leftover is a common source of the leak itself. Don’t stop at the GPU: chipset and LAN drivers were specifically implicated in the forum diagnosis above, and any driver that allocates memory in a loop can produce the identical symptom. If you want to confirm which specific driver is leaking rather than just guessing, Windows’ built-in poolmon utility tracks memory allocation by driver tag — the more advanced diagnostic step if a clean driver reinstall alone doesn’t resolve it.

When It’s Genuinely a VRAM Shortage

If your hardware sits below the game’s VRAM recommendation — an older 4-6GB card running a current AAA title at high settings — the crash may be a real shortage, not a Windows configuration bug. Confirm it the same way outlined above: check GPU-Z’s actual allocation figure rather than Task Manager’s, and if allocation is genuinely pegged near your card’s total VRAM, lowering texture quality and resolution is the correct fix here, not the page file. Our guide to whether 8GB of VRAM still holds up covers exactly where that ceiling sits for current releases. On 8GB-or-less cards specifically, it’s also worth testing hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling both on and off — some reports show it easing VRAM pressure when disabled on lower-VRAM cards at high resolution, so it’s a free setting to test either direction once you’ve confirmed VRAM is genuinely your bottleneck. If system RAM itself is the bottleneck rather than VRAM, our breakdown of how much RAM you actually need for gaming in 2026 sets the baseline. For a broader pass at squeezing more performance out of an aging system before you consider new hardware, our full PC optimization guide covers the settings and background-process cleanup that compound with everything above.

The Intel 13th/14th-Gen Wildcard

If you’re running a Core i9-13900K, i9-14900K, or a similar 13th/14th-gen Intel chip and seeing out-of-memory-style crashes across multiple, otherwise-unrelated games, stop troubleshooting memory settings entirely. Nixxes’ own crash documentation and the Tom’s Hardware forum diagnosis above both independently point to the same cause, and Intel has since confirmed it officially: a “Vmin Shift Instability” caused by motherboard power delivery exceeding spec combined with microcode algorithms requesting excessive voltage during normal and idle operation. Intel’s fix is a microcode update (0x12B, superseding earlier 0x125/0x129 patches) delivered through a BIOS update from your motherboard maker — not an OS patch, and not a bigger page file or a driver reinstall. One important caveat: the microcode update only prevents further degradation. If your chip has already been damaged by the elevated voltage, Intel states the update won’t restore it, and affected units need to go through Intel’s warranty extension program instead.

FAQ

Does adding more RAM fix an out of memory error in games?

Sometimes, but often not. Since the real ceiling is your page file plus installed RAM combined, adding RAM raises that ceiling — which genuinely helps if you’re running an older system with 8-16GB total. It does nothing for a 32GB system hitting the same crash, because the problem there is how fast Windows can grow the page file or a driver refusing to release memory, not the total amount available. Check which row of the diagnostic table above matches your system before spending money on a RAM upgrade.

Should I let Windows manage the page file automatically or set it manually?

Set it manually. Automatic sizing is convenient, but it’s also the specific behavior Microsoft’s own support documentation names as the cause of slow-growth allocation failures. A fixed size removes the growth delay entirely and is fully reversible if it doesn’t help.

Is “out of memory” the same error as “out of video memory”?

No, and the distinction matters for which fix applies. “Out of memory” describes hitting the system commit limit — RAM plus page file. “Out of video memory” describes a specific VRAM budget your GPU driver couldn’t satisfy, which can still be a page-file problem on high-end hardware (the page file backs part of that VRAM budget) or a genuine shortage on older cards. The diagnostic table above separates the two.

Sources

1. Microsoft. How to determine the appropriate page file size for 64-bit versions of Windows. Microsoft Learn
2. Microsoft. Memory allocation errors can be caused by slow page file growth (KB4055223). Microsoft Learn
3. Nixxes Software. Video Memory Crash. Nixxes Support (PlayStation Studios)
4. MakeUseOf. Task Manager Is Lying About Your GPU Memory — Here’s What’s Actually Happening. MakeUseOf
5. Tom’s Hardware Forum community (Colif et al.). Games constantly crashing “out of memory,” but Task Manager shows plenty of RAM and VRAM? Tom’s Hardware
6. Wagnardsoft. Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU). Wagnardsoft
7. XDA Developers. Intel Identifies the Root Cause of 13th and 14th Gen CPU Instability, Rolls Out a New Microcode Update to Fix Issues. XDA Developers

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.