TLDR possible fix: Full screen mode “full screen (windowed)” might avoid the memory issue with TWW by not engaging explorer.exe. Still monitoring, but looks to be working for me
Background:
I bought the War Within about a week and a half ago. Since then I’ve experienced at least 25 crashes. Suddenly WoW freezes my entire computer and give me an out of memory error and my computer terminates it. I’ve got 32GB of RAM so that’s pretty unexpected. I played DragonFlight completely without issues on the same computer and settings. I also see there are many other forum posts here and in the EU WoW forums with the same problem when TWW released in August.
Issue:
These out of memory crashes occur consistently in main cities for me. Here were my last 90 minutes of gameplay:
Logged in to Dornogal - successful
AFK in Dornogal - Everything begins to start freezing up, characters stop moving, crash
Relaunch WoW, logged in again, loaded successfully
Teleported to Tanaris successful
Hearthstone to Dornogal - crash in loading screen
Relaunch WoW, logged in again, loaded successfully
Undercity portal in Org - crash in loading screen
Relaunch WoW, logged in again, loaded successfully
Brill portal to Org - crash in loading screen
I’ve had at least 25 crashes over the past week playing casually.
Specs:
-CPU: intel i7-8700 @ 3.20GHz, 3192 Mhz, 6 cores
-GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
-RAM: 32GB DDR4
-Game is downloaded on a 2TB SSD, Windows 10
My graphics cards drivers and Windows 10 are all up to date. I removed all addons a few days ago and the crashes are still happening, so it is not an addon issue.
Troubleshooting:
-tested turning off all addons, still crashing consistently
-tested a possible fix from another forum post to turn off the 5 compatibility settings at the bottom of the graphics settings in game. Still crashed
-Same error from wow.exe on crash “Error: Not enough memory resources are available to process this command”
-I found the following Event Viewer log:
“Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: explorer.exe (5296) consumed 19943116800 bytes, Wow.exe (15148) consumed 9423876096 bytes”
-That’s ~19GB on explorer.exe and ~9GB on wow.exe
-quick google search is that explorer.exe is used when WoW is played in Windowed mode. I am playing in Windowed mode.
-Found corresponding Windows Event Viewer logs for each of the crashes this morning with the same explorer.exe and wow.exe memory usage
-Normally wow.exe is using 4-5GB of memory on my computer in center of Dornogal, and Windows Explorer is 181MB
-I can reproduce the issue by simply AFKing in central Dornogal, generally takes less than 30 minutes to crash out
-Tested still in Windows mode, it crashed. There is no change to either wow or explorer in task manager. I took a screenshot of my task manager and the WoW crash error, but I don’t think I can post screenshots into here.
-Changed to Fullscreen mode, fully closed WoW + BNET, restarted. Been afk in center of Dornogal for over 100 minutes with no issue. Appears to be working
Not sure if this is still affecting people, but posting this if it can help. So far it seems to be working for me. Will update again if I get a crash on full screen mode