What causes an Unreal out-of-video-memory crash?

The game asked for more VRAM than the GPU has — usually oversized textures, too-high resolution or quality settings, or a leak that grows GPU memory over time.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix “Out of video memory” Crashes in Unreal Engine

Quick answer: Lower texture and resolution settings, cap the streaming pool, and check for a steady VRAM climb that signals a leak — then reduce the working set to fit the target GPU.

An out-of-video-memory crash means the GPU ran out of room. On minimum-spec hardware this is common with high settings. Here is how to bring usage under the budget.

How to fix it

1. Lower texture and resolution settings

4K textures, high screen percentage, and max quality scalability quickly exhaust low-end VRAM. Provide and test lower settings so the game fits the GPUs you target.

2. Cap the streaming pool

An unbounded texture streaming pool can balloon. Set a pool size appropriate for the minimum GPU so streaming stays within the budget instead of demanding more than exists.

3. Hunt a VRAM leak

If memory climbs steadily until it crashes rather than failing immediately, something is not releasing GPU resources. Profile VRAM over a session to find what keeps growing.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unreal Engine error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.