The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — How to Fix "Out of Video Memory / DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED"

The game crashes with an out-of-video-memory message, a DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED error, or a D3D device hung error — most often in Novigrad, Toussaint, or during cutscenes.

Path tracing on an 8 GB card overflows VRAM. The driver resets the device before the game can recover, which is why the crash looks like a driver fault rather than a settings problem.

Genuine physical VRAM exhaustion during fast transitions or in dense areas, separate from the path tracing case.

On Intel 13th and 14th generation desktop CPUs, crashes during shader decompression are a CPU Vcore stability problem, not a graphics memory problem at all — this misleads a lot of troubleshooting.

Turn off ray tracing entirely, including ray-traced global illumination, reflections, shadows and ambient occlusion. Then load the same save that crashed. If it stops, re-enable one ray-traced option at a time.

This frees roughly 2 GB. Counter-intuitively it also looks sharper on an 8 GB card: when the VRAM buffer overflows, REDengine silently drops mip levels, so Ultra can render muddier textures than High.

Install the latest motherboard BIOS with Intel microcode 0x12F or later and apply Intel defaults. Oodle shader decompression crashes on these chips reflect voltage stability, not GPU memory — no graphics setting will fix them.

Virtual memory absorbs the overflow. Put it on fast storage so the fallback does not turn into a stall.

Set 60 FPS rather than leaving it uncapped. Uncapped frame rates raise GPU load, heat and power spikes, all of which precipitate driver resets during demanding scenes.

Repeat the exact save and area that crashed, then stay there for fifteen minutes. Also check Event Viewer for Display errors — if nvlddmkm keeps appearing, the VRAM budget is still over.

Steam refunds within 14 days of purchase and under 2 hours of playtime, and documented technical faults are sometimes accepted past that. Microsoft Store and Epic follow similar rules with store-specific exception paths.

Attach crash logs, a DxDiag and the steps you already tried. A denied refund can sometimes be overturned when you can show the game is genuinely unplayable rather than simply disliked.

If the failure follows an anti-cheat ban or a modified online client, no store will refund it. That is a separate category from a game that will not run.