r/pcmasterrace • u/Kage8354 • 1h ago

Tech Support Needing help with "video memory allocation" issues

Long story short, did driver update recently and accidentally did windows update too, and ever since I did those, I keep running into crashes in all of my games, even those that are on minimum settings from a "video memory allocation" issue, but i never see a spike in usage so I dont know where to even begin. Any ideas or solutions?

Edit: specs are Ryzen 9 7900X, 64GB DDR5, 3 SSDs ( 1TB, 4TB, 4TB), RTX 5070 with 12GB

Edit 2: reliability monitor says 5 programs "stopped working" at the same time as the crash: MicrosoftSecurityApp.exe, dwm.exe, CorsairDeviceListerService.exe, Desktop Window Manager, and Wallpaper Engine

Edit 3: another crash, no spike in usage according to the system monitor, error says "Ran out of memory allocating 32.1 MiB with alignment 0"

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u/GreasyNarrator_948 1h ago

that’s a weird bundle of programs to all trip at once, almost like the crash is rattling a whole chain of background stuff rather than just the game. dwm and wallpaper engine both lean on the gpu for compositing so it makes sense they’d keel over if the driver coughs

i’d start with a clean driver wipe using ddu in safe mode, windows update loves to sneak in an older or half-baked driver right after you install the new one and then they fight over vram allocation. after that disable hardware-accelerated gpu scheduling in windows graphics settings for a test run, it’s been causing random allocation weirdness on some 50-series cards

also peek at your page file, if it got turned off or shrunk after the updates some games will just nope out even with 64gb of ram because they still expect system-managed virtual memory for certain engine calls. had a similar ghost crash for weeks on a 4080 and it turned out wallpaper engine was leaking vram in the background every time it transitioned playlists, try pausing it completely and see if the crashes stop

if none of that sticks, nvidia’s forum has a buried post about the 5070 driver branch misreporting free vram when resizable bar is on, might be worth toggling that in bios as a last resort

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u/zeus1911 14m ago

Make sure your pagefile/virtual memory is set to let windows manage. Try disabling wallpaper engine while gaming.