Last patch made me start Out of memory crashing every ~90+ minutes

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Performance Feedback
1

Issue Description (Required):

EDIT: STILL HAPPENING after new patch “fix” and getting new PC: 4080 and 9800X3D lol

def seems to be a memory leak with the recent patch

maybe i should rollback gpu drivers ?

i run 4080, 5800x3d, 32gb ram

i have 900 hours played in all of 2025 and have had performance vary between the patch cycles, but the game was def most stable pre-hive scum release I think as far as crashes go (server stability was an issuefor half a havoc season i recall but great rn)

Attempted Solutions (Optional):

i run the lua launch command to double the lua heap memory

5 Likes
2

I observed same problem.

I started off disabling all mods.

Sometimes 3 games or 5 games without restart. It drops performance massively.

Restart of game fixes it. RAM usage looks normal 6GB.

So now when I exit a mission, next to Havoc terminal and notice my FPS drops to less than half. I know it’s time to restart before starting next mission. Not great advice I know…

Strange thing is. It never happens “during” mission. It will happen straight at the start of a mission when it does happen. Well I know it will happen when FPS plummets in mourningstar after a mission return.

Even more strange - There hasn’t been a game patch for a month, but only experienced this week.

I did update to latest Nvidia drivers recently 591.74. But that was 8 days ago and didn’t experience anything at the time.

I’ve done comment search for Darktide in Nvidia driver 591.74 reddit post and also official nvidia driver forum, no reports.

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Very bizarre indeed… I have 64GB of RAM & this has happened to be once in a blue moon here & there. I just use the –lua-heap-mb-size 2048 launch command & I haven’t had an issues since then. I did this like maybe 2-3 months ago or something & it’s been fine. I’m shocked it’s still happening for you even after that? I would probably roll back the driver or try & reinstall the same one or if worse comes to worse, maybe do a fresh reinstall of the game after clearing your Darktide folder, which would be super extreme & would reset all your stuff, but people have reported it working properly. if none of the temporary solutions are working for you.

4

Came across this from reddit, steam months ago but kind of ignored it as placebo.

I might just give it a try anyway, can’t hurt.

MemoryLeakFix at Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Nexus - Mods and community

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Can you get the exact error message? I suspect it’s the Lua script engine, but it could also be the game itself. I’d be surprised if the game had a serious memory leak that was causing this. I would consider it more likely that a mod has a leak, or you’re just hitting the 2 GB cap Lua has.

Also the ‘mem leak fix’ mod cannot fix a memory leak. It’s calling garbage collection more often which won’t fix a memory leak but may help alleviate an OoM error with Lua. If you know the allocated memory is not freed and you can free it, it’s not a leak… That’s sorta integral to what a memory leak is.

6

Can be easily solved by looking into console logs, at the very bottom:

20:50:43.362 warning: [DummyRegistryAllocator] Registry 'D3D12Memory' has still registered 0 b used and 5034344448 b allocated

Yes, there is a memory leak

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Is it a major memory leak? Is it leaking 1 MB/match, or 1 MB/frame… There’s a big difference.

From my logs it looks like a 300 MB per match. Someone with 32 GB of memory isn’t going to run out of physical memory for a few days of playing. It’s not a good thing, but I’m not convinced the memory leak is OP’s issue.

300 MB per match isn’t great, but it’s not going to have serious implications for someone with 32 GB of memory.

1 Like
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Goddammit It even tells you its the GPU memory…

Registry 'D3D12Memory' has still registered 0 b used and 6095241216 b allocated

Registry 'index_buffer' has still registered 0 b used and 591396864 b allocated

Registry 'vertex_buffer' has still registered 0 b used and 5167382528 b allocated

Registry 'default_heap_constant_buffer' has still registered 0 b used and 65536 b allocated

How did you look at the console log, saw the ‘vertex_buffer’ along with ‘D3D12Memory’ and decided to talk about system memory?

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I also have memory crashes. The game uses 14Go of RAM, which at the moment is an expensive issue !

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Yup, you’re right that is GPU memory leaking.

Never mind, it’s not a leak, it’s a log entry that’s not being read in the correct context.

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It can be mod related, specifically numeric ui and possibly creature spawner, try to disable them, not in the mod menu, but completely remove from loading in mods folder.

13

Even thou the memory leak affects everyone, it seems the OOM crash is tied to hight texture quality and loading onto Mourningstar after a mission.

I can semi-reliably reproduce OOM crash on 3070 with high textures, but my 2070 running at medium is far far less affected, doesn’t crash and when it happens going to a mission solves it.

My suggestion for people who are crashing because of memory, lowering textures to medium might be a temporary workaround until its fixed!

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I’ll see if I can add gpu memory to my overlay and record when I play tonight.

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I played for 7 hours last night, without restarting the game.

VRAM usage started around 9 GB and ended at about 11 GB.

At this point I don’t think there is a serious memory leak, just log entries being read without the correct context.

From my log files summing up the total allocated but not referenced memory it was 6.8 GB. But my total memory only grew by about 2 GB. A few minutes ago I started a game and then quit immediately after getting to the morning star. I started (and ended) at 9 GB, but the sum of the total allocated but not referenced in the log file was 5 GB. Clearly the game did not leak 5 GB of VRAM in just a few minutes.

At this point, I believe that the game is not freeing the VRAM memory prior to exiting, and the log file is (correctly) reporting that it wasn’t freeded when it exits. That’s not a memory leak, there’s no need to free the memory if you’re going to quit. The OS will release it after the game exits.

1 Like
16

started for me like 2 weeks ago, same thing, im not using a powerful machine (laptop ryzen 7 7th gen and rtx 4050 with frame gen) so when it happens my fps really tanks (from 100-140 with framegen to 60 with framegen lol). I play havoc 40’s only, and i need to restart after every game its ridiculous. Had a game yesterday where i saw my ui crosshair glitch at the start of the match after the dropdown, knew i was cooked i forgot to restart, didnt die or go down so i couldn’t restart, played the whole game at 30 fps or below basically, it was the most miserable experience since i started playing this game..

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saw this comment as well bob, will try to turn the setting down (currently am using high texture setting) and see if its any better..

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Does your console log also say something about mesh_streamer? If so it might be worth disabling it as well

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nope, no mention of mesh_streamer in the logs, also, im not crashing due to out of memory since i restart after every game, just the terrible performance drops like the guy in the post above mentioned (Headhunter)

20

Fatshark, plz fix

21

Try the old dx12 shader cache clear of game.

Powershell script below to see the shader_cache.hans file it deletes and also cache_data it empties out.

Also in game launcher I reset graphics settings, save. Then in game re-setup them up again.

I always use Texture quality to Medium since I was getting LOD issues on High.

$EBWebViewCacheFolder = $env:APPDATA + "\Fatshark\Darktide\EBWebView\Default\Cache\Cache_Data"
$hansCacheFile = $env:APPDATA + "\Fatshark\Darktide\shader_cache.hans"

Get-ChildItem $EBWebViewCacheFolder | Foreach { Write-Output ("Deleting " + $_.FullName); Remove-Item $_.FullName }

if (Test-Path $hansCacheFile) {
Write-Output "Deleting hansCacheFile..."
Remove-Item $hansCacheFile
}

Read-Host -Prompt "Press Enter to exit..."

Steam heapsize, Streaming assets changes. Seems like we have to do so many things

DDU has a function to clear also Nvidia’s own GPU shader cache too.