How to Fix ARC Raiders “Out of Video Memory Trying to Allocate a Rendering Resource” Crash (2026 Guide)

You queue up, the Stella Montis loading bar crawls along, you’re already planning your loot route, and then the game dies. The error reads “LowLevelFatalError: Out of video memory trying to allocate a rendering resource.” Your gear is gone and your squad is waiting. I’d say I’m sorry, but I know that rage too well to waste your time.

Embark built a gorgeous extraction shooter, and the post-apocalyptic world looks incredible. It runs on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite doing the heavy lifting, and that fidelity costs real resources. The part that drives people up the wall is that this crash doesn’t care how fat your rig is. Players on RTX 40-series cards, and even early 50-series, are hitting it. If a flagship GPU throws a “not enough VRAM” error, something else is going on.

I pulled together what’s working for people across Steam discussions, r/ArcRaiders, r/pcmasterrace and UE5 optimization docs, and sorted it by how much each fix helps versus how much hassle it is. Work through them in order.

Why This Crash Happens (It’s Usually Not Your VRAM)

The error message lies a little. In most cases your graphics card is not physically too small. These are the usual culprits:

• Shader compilation spikes. On boot or map load, UE5 compiles thousands of shaders at once. RAM and VRAM usage jumps hard for a moment, and if the buffer overflows even briefly, DirectX 12 pulls the plug.
• A weak or missing pagefile. When physical memory fills up, Windows leans on virtual memory. If that is disabled, too small, or parked on a slow drive, UE5 games fall over fast.
• Driver-app “optimization.” The NVIDIA App and GeForce Experience love pushing “recommended” settings that override what you picked in-game, sometimes with texture budgets your card can’t hold steady.
• Ray tracing memory behavior. RTX Global Illumination eats VRAM, and some players report it not releasing memory properly over long sessions.
• Unstable Intel 13th/14th Gen CPUs. Yes, really. A flaky i9/i7 can throw this error as a side effect.

Match your symptom to a cause before you start clicking around:

Fix 1: Rebuild Your Windows Pagefile (The Big One)

If you only do one thing from this guide, do this. It’s the fix that comes up most often in threads, and I’d bet it saves the largest share of players. Automatic pagefile management sometimes shoves virtual memory onto a slow drive or sizes it too small for UE5’s shader burst, and that gets you a crash on map load.

1. Hit the Windows key, type Advanced System Settings and open it.
2. In the Advanced tab, click Settings… under Performance.
3. Go to the Advanced tab again and click Change… under Virtual Memory.
4. Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.”
5. Pick your fastest SSD, ideally the NVMe drive where ARC Raiders lives (usually C:).
6. Choose Custom size.
7. Set Initial size to 16384 MB and Maximum size to 32768 MB.
8. Click Set. This is the step everyone forgets. Skip it and nothing saves.
9. Hit OK, apply, and restart your PC.

That’s a 16 GB baseline that can stretch to 32 GB during heavy loads. Yes, it takes SSD space. Your SSD can spare it, and it beats losing a raid with a full backpack.

Fix 2: Turn Down NVIDIA RTX Global Illumination

If you can reach the main menu before the crash hits, go here next. Several players on Steam tied the crashes to the game’s RTX Global Illumination setup, with VRAM creeping up until something snaps.

1. Open Settings and go to the Graphics tab.
2. Find the Ray Tracing section.
3. Locate Nvidia RTX Global Illumination.
4. Switch it to Static, or turn it off entirely.
5. Save and restart the game.

My honest take: Static looks great. In a game where you’re constantly checking corners for ARC patrols and other raiders, you will not miss fully dynamic bounced lighting. The VRAM savings are noticeable, and the stability gain is worth far more than a prettier shadow in a warehouse.

Fix 3: Reset Your NVIDIA Profile and the Game’s Local Config

Does the game die before you even see the menu? Then your in-game settings aren’t the problem, because you can’t reach them. Something external is forcing values on the game.

1. Fully close ARC Raiders and open the NVIDIA App (or old-school GeForce Experience).
2. Find ARC Raiders in your game list.
3. Look at the Optimal Settings profile. Don’t crank it to max. Drag it toward performance, or revert to default.
4. For a harder reset, press Win + R, type %localappdata%, hit Enter, find the PioneerGame or ArcRaiders folder, and rename it to ArcRaiders.old.

The rename trick forces the game to generate fresh, low-demand baseline configs on the next launch. Nothing gets deleted, so if it makes no difference you can restore the old folder. Free troubleshooting, basically.

Fix 4: Clear the Shader Cache

Broken shader files left over from previous playtests or old builds can cause allocation failures when the engine tries to write over them. A clean slate fixes it surprisingly often.

NVIDIA players:

• Press Win + R, enter %localappdata%\NVIDIA, and delete everything inside DXCache and GLCache.
• Go up one level to the Local folder, open NVIDIA Corporation, and clear NV_Cache.
• If files are “in use,” skip them or close your browser and background apps, then try again.

AMD players:

• Open AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition and click the gear icon in the top right.
• Go to Graphics, scroll to Advanced, and hit Reset Shader Cache then Perform Reset.

Expect the first launch afterward to take longer while shaders rebuild. Let it finish. Alt-tabbing out of it is a classic way to cause the same crash again.

Fix 5: Verify Your Game Files

UE5 packs its assets into huge .pak containers. If one gets slightly corrupted during an update, the engine can’t allocate it properly and you get the same error with a different trigger. Mid-match random crashes often come from here.

1. Open Steam and go to your Library.
2. Right-click ARC Raiders and choose Properties…
3. Click Installed Files.
4. Hit Verify integrity of game files…

Steam re-downloads anything broken. Go make a sandwich. It takes a few minutes and costs you nothing.

Fix 6: Intel 13th/14th Gen Owners, This One’s For You

Running a 13900K, 14900K, 13700K or 14700K and still crashing with a monster GPU? Don’t blame the game yet. Those chips have a reputation for instability under heavy decompression loads, and ARC Raiders streams a lot of data. The memory-controller trouble can surface as a video memory error.

• Update your motherboard BIOS to the latest 2025/2026 release so you get Intel’s microcode stability fixes (0x129 / 0x12B or newer).
• Select the “Intel Default Settings” profile in BIOS instead of your board maker’s unlocked power setup, which can push extra voltage through the memory controller.
• Not comfortable in the BIOS? Use Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) and drop your P-Core ratio by 1x or 2x, for example from 55x to 54x.

You lose a hair of peak performance and gain a PC that doesn’t fall over. A frame or two never beat a stable extraction.

What I’d Do If I Were Staring at That Error Right Now

Skip the random experimenting. Here’s my order:

1. Pagefile first. It’s the most reported fix and takes five minutes plus a reboot.
2. Verify files while you’re restarting anyway.
3. Clear the shader cache if the crash comes at startup.
4. Set RTXGI to Static if you crash 20 to 30 minutes into a session.
5. Check your CPU if you’re on 13th/14th Gen Intel and nothing else worked.

Keep your GPU drivers current through official channels, and match your in-game texture settings to your card instead of dragging everything to Ultra out of pride. A stable High beats a crashing Epic every single time.

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Final Thoughts

ARC Raiders is one of the best extraction shooters I’ve sunk hours into, and losing a run to a fatal error is brutal. The good news is that this particular crash is rarely about your hardware being too weak. It’s almost always a memory management hiccup, a bad cache, or a settings conflict, and every one of those has a fix you can apply tonight.

Embark may ship a patch that handles the worst of it, but waiting around with your loot at stake is no plan. Fix your pagefile, tame the ray tracing, and get back out there. See you topside, raider.

Did one of these fixes save your run? Drop a comment with your GPU and which fix worked, because that helps the next player who hits the same wall.

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