Fix Witcher 3 Remastered Out of Video Memory Trying to Allocate Rendering Resource Error

Picture this. You’ve just fast-traveled into Novigrad, the path-traced lighting is making the rain on the cobblestones look like a movie, you’re 40 minutes into a perfect session, and then the screen freezes and drops you on the desktop with this:

“Out of video memory trying to allocate a rendering resource. Make sure your video card has the minimum required memory, try lowering the resolution and/or closing other applications that are running. Exiting…”

Yeah. Rough.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered landed in late September 2026 and the visual jump is huge: path tracing, reworked ray-traced global illumination, upgraded community-inspired textures, deeper engine work. It’s gorgeous. It’s also, on PC, a bit of a crash machine for a lot of people, and the forums (Reddit, Steam hubs, the official CDPR boards) are full of players holding RTX 4080s, 5080s and Radeon 9070s wondering why a card with 16 GB of VRAM claims it’s out of memory.

Short answer: the error message is lying to you, or at least telling you only part of the truth. Here’s what’s going on and how to fix it.

Why Your 16 GB Card “Runs Out” of Memory

Seeing that message does not automatically mean your GPU is too small. After reading through piles of player reports and testing the usual suspects, the crash boils down to three separate culprits. Figuring out which one is yours saves hours of random tweaking.

1. The path tracing memory leak

This one is the biggest offender. Turn on path tracing or the new RT global illumination, stack Frame Generation and DLSS/FSR on top, and the game starts hoarding VRAM like a dragon sitting on gold. Players report starting at a comfortable 8 to 10 GB, then watching the number creep up over 30 to 45 minutes of play. Fast travel between heavy hubs like Novigrad and Beauclair is where it gets ugly. Memory doesn’t get released properly, usage keeps climbing, and eventually the DirectX 12 allocator hits the ceiling of your card and bails out.

2. Intel 13th and 14th Gen CPU instability

Here’s the plot twist nobody expects: a good chunk of people getting this “video memory” error are running i9-13900K, i7-13700K, i9-14900K or i7-14700K chips. Many motherboards push these CPUs with aggressive factory voltage profiles. During shader compilation and rapid asset streaming, that can cause tiny instabilities. The CPU fumbles an instruction thread, DX12 sees a timeout, and the engine reports it as “out of video memory.” Wrong diagnosis, same crash.

If Witcher 3 only crashes during loading screens or fast travel, and other heavy games have also been randomly flaky for you, look hard at this one.

3. Day-one AMD driver trouble

On the red side, RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 cards (including the shiny new RX 9000 lineup) had a rough launch. The initial driver branches choked on the heavy asset streaming the new path-tracing model demands. Some players crashed the moment they loaded a save. Others got visual weirdness like glowing hair and vegetation that simply wasn’t there.

Quick Reference: Match Your Problem to the Fix

Fix 1: Install the AMD Adrenalin 26.9.2 Hotfix (Radeon Owners)

If you’re on Radeon, start here and don’t skip it. AMD pushed out Adrenalin 26.9.2 WHQL specifically to patch the launch-week mess on RX 7000 and RX 9000 cards. Just clicking “update” over your old driver isn’t enough. Old leftovers love to cause trouble, so do it properly:

1. Download Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU).
2. Boot into Windows Safe Mode, run DDU and pick Clean and restart.
3. Install the fresh 26.9.2 WHQL package straight from AMD’s site.
4. Launch the game and sit on the main menu until shader pre-compilation finishes. Loading a save too early is a classic way to trigger the crash again.

That last step is the one people ignore, and it matters.

Fix 2: Put Your Intel CPU Back on a Leash (13th/14th Gen)

This is the fix that surprised me the most, because it has nothing to do with graphics on paper. If you own an unlocked 13th or 14th Gen Intel chip and the game dies during fast travel or loads, your motherboard is probably feeding the CPU more power than Intel ever intended.

Here’s how to reel it in:

1. Reboot and hammer Delete or F2 to enter BIOS.
2. Find the CPU configuration or overclocking section (Ai Tweaker on ASUS, OC on MSI, Tweaker on Gigabyte).
3. Look for the Intel Default / Baseline Profile option and switch it from Auto to Intel Baseline (or Extreme, depending on how good your cooling is).
4. Prefer manual control? Set PL1 to 125W or 253W, PL2 to 253W, and IccMax to 307A or 400A, based on Intel’s official spec sheet for your exact model.
5. Save and exit.

You’ll lose a sliver of benchmark glory, but you gain a PC that doesn’t throw phantom errors. Honestly, a stable 5% slower beats a crash at the Bloody Baron quest every time. Also check your motherboard vendor for the latest BIOS update, since many have shipped microcode fixes for these chips.

Fix 3: Tame the Path Tracing VRAM Leak

Got plenty of VRAM, say 16 GB or more, and still crashing after an hour? That’s the leak. Until CDPR and the studio working on the remaster ship a proper stability patch, you can slow it down enough to play comfortably.

• Use an upscaler. Playing at native 4K with path tracing is brutal. Set DLSS or FSR to Quality or Balanced. Native 4K plus Frame Generation floods the allocation queue faster than Windows can hand out memory.
• Drop Texture Quality by one notch. Going from Ultra+ to Ultra frees over 1.5 GB of buffer, and in actual gameplay you won’t see the difference. Not unless you’re pixel-peeping a rock with your nose against the screen.
• Turn off NVIDIA HairWorks. Its asset pooling tends to hold on to memory chunks instead of releasing them during fast travel. Geralt’s hair will survive.

Think of it as buying yourself headroom. The leak is still there, but now it has a lot more road to travel before it hits a wall.

Fix 4: Give Windows a Bigger Paging File

Remastered leans hard on virtual address space. If your paging file is small, locked behind an old mechanical drive, or handled badly by Windows’ automatic settings, the system can’t catch the overflow, and you get the same crash message.

1. Press the Windows key, type Advanced System Settings, hit Enter.
2. Under the Advanced tab, click Settings in the Performance section.
3. Go to the Advanced tab again and click Change under Virtual Memory.
4. Untick Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.
5. Pick your fastest drive, ideally the NVMe SSD that holds the game.
6. Choose Custom size: Initial 16384 MB, Maximum 24576 MB.
7. Click Set, then OK, and restart.

It costs you some disk space and nothing else. Cheap insurance.

Fix 5: Wipe the DirectX Shader Cache

Shader caches built under older game versions or old drivers can go bad, and a corrupted cache is a nasty source of random allocation failures when the engine tries to write new render threads. Clearing it takes two minutes.

1. Open the Start menu, type Disk Cleanup, and launch it.
2. Select your system drive (usually C:).
3. Untick everything except DirectX Shader Cache.
4. Confirm the deletion.
5. For a deeper clean, press Win + R, type %localappdata%, and look for AMD, NVIDIA or CD Projekt Red folders holding extra shader caches. Clear those too.
6. Launch the game and be patient. The intro screens will take a few minutes while it rebuilds a clean shader table.

Don’t skip the patience part. Alt-tabbing or hammering Skip during the rebuild defeats the purpose.

Fix 6: Kill the Overlays

Every overlay is a little program that wants a slice of your video memory, and some of them play badly with DX12. The usual suspects:

• Discord: User Settings, Advanced, turn off Hardware Acceleration, and disable the in-game overlay completely.
• Steam: right-click the game, Properties, untick Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game.
• GOG Galaxy: Settings, Game Features, switch off the overlay.

Yes, you lose the shiny popup telling you your friend started playing. You’ll live.

What I’d Try First (My Honest Order of Operations)

Don’t do all six fixes at once, because then you’ll never know what worked. Here’s the order I’d follow:

1. Radeon user? Clean driver install, no debate.
2. Intel 13th/14th Gen? BIOS baseline profile and the latest BIOS update.
3. Crashes after long sessions? Upscaler, textures down one notch, HairWorks off.
4. Still crashing? Shader cache flush, then the paging file.
5. Last stop: overlays.

Change one thing, play for an hour, and see what happens. It’s slower, but you’ll actually learn what was wrong with your rig.

How to Fix The Witcher 3 Remastered White Screen on Startup (2026 PC Guide)

Final Thoughts

I love this remaster. Walking through Velen with path-traced light bouncing through the trees is the kind of thing that makes you stop riding Roach and just stare. But a launch this big shouldn’t hand players a crash loop with a misleading error message, and the VRAM leak is a flaw CDPR needs to fix in a proper patch. Until that lands, these workarounds are the best you’ve got, and for most people, a combination of upscaling, a clean driver or BIOS tweak, and a bigger page file gets the game stable again.

The error says your GPU is out of memory. Most of the time, the real story is a leak, a driver, or a CPU running hotter than it should. Fix those and Geralt can go back to doing what he does best: killing monsters without crashing.

How to Fix Out of Video Memory Trying to Allocate a Texture Error