Intel PCs crashing with "out of video memory" BSOD, but AMD and Nvidia apparently innocent

While advancements in technology like Microsoft DirectStorage are helping to significantly reduce I/O-based load times in games, long shader compilation times are something games continue to struggle with. There are ways to reduce this like shader pre-compilation or shader caching in GPUs but in worst-case scenarios, like in the case of The Callisto Protocol, shader compilation and shader loading can lead to a stuttery mess.

Shader compilation is done on the CPU and as you might have noticed, your CPU usage may be up at or close to 100% usage when this happens. Shader compilation can also be done parallelly to help take advantage of multi-core CPUs to help speed it up and reduce load times. However, this might be causing Intel's 13th Gen CPUs to crash in games that are doing this.

Several users online as well as those in the media say they are experiencing crashing issues in games on their Raptor Lake Intel 13th Gen processor. Some of these crashes are going down with an "out of video memory trying to allocate a rendering resource" out of memory (OOM) error and although at first glance it could seem like it is an issue as a consequence of running out of VRAM - looks at Nvidia - apparently the problem may be due to the heavy all-core workload that shader compilation can create.

Some of the users affected by this problem have apparently been able to resolve this by lowering their clock speeds, which consequently led to a more stable system. This workaround was seemingly provided by an Nvidia engineer to a user "TheDucky94" on the Unreal Engine forum.

If you’re getting the out of video memory error when launching The Finals, you more than likely need to downclock your CPU.

Despite the game saying the issue is with your VRAM, if your PC has an i9-13900K (or KF) CPU, then you need to perform a slight downclock to fix the problem. For some reason, Unreal Engine 5 games seem to have some issues with this particular model (and possibly other 13th-generation Intel CPUs).

...

We have identified an issue on some Intel 13th generation CPU’s where upon startup the game will display a message about being out of video memory or the crash reporter will pop up referencing an issue with decompressing a shader. If you experience this problem, you will likely also see it in other DX12 games.

If your CPU is overclocked, try setting it back to the defaults. If you’re not overclocked or that doesn’t work, try installing Intel Extreme Tuning Utility:
[Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) 4](https://Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) and lowering your “Performance Core Ratio” from 55x to 54x.”

It is known that Intel has had to resolve to bumping up its CPU frequencies in order to keep up with AMD's Ryzen which is why the power consumption figures have gone sky-high over the last few generations. It was also recently accused, again, of inflating benchmark scores to seem better than its chips really are.