EDIT: Looks like it was probably SteelSeries Moments that was interfering with WoW somehow, even without reaching 100% memory. Crashes appear to have stopped after I disabled the app.
Earlier today my WoW crashed with an OOM error while I was camping for a rare spawn. I logged back in, eventually got my rare, teleported back to the Arcantina, and have been unable to leave for Silvermoon - 4 times in a row now, whenever I take the portal from the Arcantina, I hit the same OOM error. The last couple of times I kept an eye on my PC’s memory usage, and the error doesn’t make sense. I have 48 GB of memory, and the errors are happening while I sit somewhere in the 32-33 range. This most recent game boot, I couldn’t even load into the Arcanatina, the game crashed immediately after the loading screen.
Between a restart, a memcheck (no errors), and a few hours of playing other stuff, things appear to be fine again. I still believe there’s something wrong with the memory allocation, but I can live with the occasional crash every few weeks, which has been the norm lately.
Make sure no background apps are using hardware accleration and that no overlays are running. Web browser, Discord, keyboard/mouse apps, RGB apps, etc, almost all of them will default to using HA and most of them default to having overlays enabled (even if they never show anything).
WoW doesn’t “support” running the game with other things running at the same time, meaning they don’t design the game around other apps potentially breaking things with the game.
Well, I do have other things, obviously, but the game crashes when I have 15-16 GB to spare, I’ve been staring at my Task Manager.
The issue did come back too Maybe something’s wrong with Silvermoon, I don’t have this problem with my Orgrimmar-parked bank alt for example (who runs the same addons) , or a higher level Dornogal-parked alt. I ended up updating video drivers and restarting, and have been tentatively fine since.
I did also notice SteelSeries Moments eating abnormal amounts of RAM independently of these crashes (and others have been reporting similar things), and have since disabled that. We’ll see if this proves the culprit.
That will do it… Any “record what just happened” type features in apps are notorious for causing headaches with games and crashing. Xbox gamebar, Nvidia, AMD, etc, they all have them and I’m not sure which ones default to being on or off.
Those kinds of features typically use hardware acceleration, since GPUs go brrrrrrr with parallel compute, which means they can end up fighting with the game for things like VRAM allocations and whatnot. Something simple like a clash over memory allocation is enough to trigger one or both things to crash.
Maybe something’s wrong with Silvermoon, I don’t have this problem with my Orgrimmar-parked bank alt for example (who runs the same addons) , or a higher level Dornogal-parked alt. I ended up updating video drivers and restarting, and have been tentatively fine since.