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Out of video memory

WARDOGS crashes with "Out of video memory"

Published Data as of Season 1 · 10 Sept 2026

This one is not your machine

Not simply a card that is too small: players report it on 16 GB and 24 GB cards as well as 8 GB ones, often only after hours of play, which looks more like memory building up than a hard limit. There is no confirmed fix. Lowering texture settings and restarting the game between long sessions are the sensible things to try, and Bulkhead has not mentioned video memory in any patch note.

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What you see

WARDOGS closes with an "Out of video memory" message, sometimes with the Unreal crash reporter and an "unexpected dump" behind it. It happens at launch, when joining a server, or hours into a session, and players report it on cards with 6, 8, 16 and 24 GB of VRAM.

Also reported as: out of video memory · video memory crash · ran out of video memory · out of vram · vram crash · out of video memory trying to allocate a rendering resource · memory leak · 100% memory usage

What to do instead

The cause is not on your machine, so reinstalling and verifying will not reach it. These are the things that actually help while it lasts.

  1. 01 Note when it happens: at launch, on joining a server, or hours in

    Reported

    The reports split three ways. A player on a 6 GB laptop card gets it on every launch. A player on an 8 GB card gets it when joining a server. Players on 16 GB and 24 GB cards get it at random, one of them "typically after a few hours". If it happens at launch on a card below 8 GB, you may genuinely be short of video memory. If it comes hours in on a big card, the size of your card is probably not the problem.

  2. 02 Lower texture quality first, then close other GPU-heavy apps

    Unconfirmed

    Textures take up most of the video memory in an Unreal Engine game, so lowering texture quality frees the most. Browsers, Discord and recording software also use video memory while the game runs. This is general Unreal Engine advice, not a fix any WARDOGS player has confirmed.

  3. 03 Restart the game between long sessions

    Unconfirmed

    The pattern on large cards, a crash hours in rather than straight away, is what memory building up over a session looks like. Restarting the game every few hours is a cheap way to avoid losing a loadout to it. It is a way to live with the problem, not a fix.

  4. 04 Run Team17's crash checklist once

    Confirmed

    The pinned "Crashes" thread from Team17_Assist on Steam covers the basics: verify your game files, update your GPU driver, repair Elytra, remove any overclock, cap the frame rate and turn off hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. None of it is aimed at video memory, but a broken install or an unstable overclock can produce the same crash.

  5. 05 Report it with a DxDiag

    Confirmed

    Team17 asks players reporting crashes in that thread for a DxDiag file. DM the WARDOGS Support bot on the official Discord with the DxDiag, your card and how long you had been playing when it happened. How long you had been playing matters most, because it is what separates a card that is too small from memory that is building up.

Did this fix it for you?

Notes from other players who hit this code. Say what worked, what did not, and which region you are in — a fix that only works in one place is worth knowing about. Best-rated first, and there is no time limit: an answer from the first beta is still an answer.

No comments yet. Be the first to say whether this worked.

The usual explanation for an "Out of video memory" crash is that your graphics card does not have enough, and some guides to this WARDOGS crash say it is mostly 8 GB cards. The reports do not back that up. In the official Discord, one player posted it on a 16 GB RX 9070 XT during the beta, and since launch it has been posted on a 24 GB card ("when I have 24gb of it") and on 8 GB cards. In the Steam crash thread, a player who had just upgraded their PC wrote that they were "still getting out of video memory crashes. At random but typically after a few hours. Seemingly memory leak type behavior."

It is hard to see a 24 GB card running short in ordinary play. What these reports describe looks more like memory building up over a session until it runs out. Bulkhead has not said so, and no patch note mentions video memory. Patch 0.11 lists "More GPU crashes addressed", and the Season 1 changelog fixed two crash paths in frame generation, but neither says which crashes.

What does the full error message say?

Players quote it as "out of video memory". The standard Unreal Engine version of the message starts "Out of video memory trying to allocate a rendering resource" and tells you to lower the resolution or close other applications. We have not seen a WARDOGS screenshot showing the exact wording, so treat the full sentence as likely rather than confirmed.

Is my RAM running out too?

It might be a separate problem. On 25 September a thread opened in the Discord's #bug-reports forum about WARDOGS pushing system memory to 100%, freezing the PC and then crashing. The reports came from machines with 16 GB and with 32 GB of RAM, and the thread passed 30 replies within hours. An earlier Steam thread describes the same thing: memory use climbing to 90% and beyond. If Task Manager shows your RAM rather than your GPU memory filling up, you are looking at this. Nobody has reported a fix for this either, though closing the game does release the memory it was holding.

If the crash reporter opens and names a module instead, start from that module: fetched optional streams is only the reporter describing itself, and crashes mid-match covers the PIP-scope crash, which is the most common renderer crash in a match.

Source

Team17_Assist, pinned "Crashes" thread, WARDOGS Steam Discussions, 12 September 2026 (edited 18 September) ↗

If that did not do it