Question games constantly crashing "out of memory", but task manager shows plenty of RAM and VRAM?

[garyth]

PC specs:

i9-14900k
msi gtx 4080
asus rog strix z790-a
DDR5 32gb corsair dominator titanium CL34 7200mhz
4 x m.2 storage drives

i have the BIOS updated to the latest version, and have tried changing through XMP profiles and clockspeeds as well. i have even replaced the cpu just in case, and changed the voltage settings in the BIOS...

really the only thing i haven't done is fresh install of Windows 11 again, but not sure if it will fix the problem. could i just have faulty RAM kit? any ideas? thanks so much in advance...

you'd think with a build like this i would never experience any shortage of memory.. just from playing wow and having spotify, and a couple tabs open... so lame. like i said, i have task manager open for these crashes, and neither the RAM or VRAM gets anywhere close to maxed out before it just automatically closes the program, and says "out of memory".. so weird.


PS. i have also tested the GPU with FurMark, and it was running completely smooth. I've also tried different windows power settings.

 

[boju]

Is all ram accounted for in task manager, none in hardware reserved or something?

Haven't touched pagefile size or turned it off?

Was Windows install from a different system originally? If it was then you should reinstall. Not doing so can leave gremlins.

 

[Colif]

Its likely a memory leak, can run out of memory and still have free ram.

Windows treats page file & ram as memory. Drivers ask for memory and sometimes, they don't return it after they have finished with it, and sometimes they can keep asking for memory until windows runs out and you get an error.

I would suggest updating drivers. most commonly caused by lan drivers


You probably need to run poolmon, it shows what is using memory on the system

video shows how to run it,

the top line of description has command you use to identify the tag, I can't copy it here as forums will play with its formating

you need to download the windows Driver toolkit - link - as it includes poolmon

You want to find the tag that is using the biggest difference between Allocs & Frees as these are the processes keeping memory and not giving it back. Leaks are caused by software requesting memory and not giving it back when its finished.

Many of the processes are actually parts of windows as you can see the processes that manage memory here, so some will always have a lot. This is normal. You want to look at non Microsoft tags

this is a list of the most common tags - https://github.com/zodiacon/PoolMonXv2/blob/master/PoolMonX/res/pooltag.txt

I would run program just after boot, to get a baseline for usage and something to compare to when page file is massive

screenshots can help. uploading to an image sharing website and show links here for any you want help with.

 

[JWNoctis]

Back off on the overclock, including motherboard default ones. Have a look at this article.

"Increasing numbers of users of the Core i9-13900K and Core i7-13700K have reported crashes in some of the latest games, usually accompanied by an out of video memory error." 14th-gen processors are also involved, as later revealed.