Some guys noticed that their game started to crash a lot. I experienced that too. R* support is not helpful at all, so I started to play with settings. And I think I found a workaround.
How does this crash look like?
- It all started somewhere after 25th February 2021.
- You’ll get a crash after 20 minutes or something.
- In the eventvwr.msc you can see an event about crashed process. It’s GTA5.EXE with code 0xc0000005 (Memory access violation).
- There was a Rockstar Games Launcher update. I still don’t know how it affects the game, because game was NOT updated during that period. I got an update before that during 2021 but had no issues.
- It maybe related only to the Steam version, even though I saw guys complaining about it and they had EGS version. Moreover, I have EGS version as well and it didn’t got the RGL update and I had no crashes with it. My friends are all on EGS version, zero crashes for them too.
- Memtest runs fine. FurMark runs fine. Other games run fine.
What I got specifically?
- I have an outdated PC somewhere from 2011. Still can run GTA V.
- I have a laptop somewhere from 2018.
- Both of them got crashes exactly at the same time.
What doesn’t cause it
- The problem is probably not in your hardware if you got crashes after 25th February and it worked fine before because many gamers affected. If you can run other games without issues then it’s definitely not the case.
- It’s not the Windows Update. I had a 1909 version on my laptop and I wasn’t able to upgrade due to a safeguard lock for devices with Conexant audio cards. And on my PC I have a 20H2 build.
- NVIDIA driver update. Like I said, my PC is from 2011 and I have an obsolete GeForce GTX460 which NVIDIA doesn’t support with drivers anymore, so I stuck with 39x.xx drivers on it. I don’t have NVIDIA updates for 2 years now.
What is going on?
Normally your PC have a GPU with a video memory called “Dedicated Video Memory” to store graphics-related data. In different situations you can hit a problem when this memory is full, so your system can provide additional storage from the actual RAM. It’s called “Shared Video Memory”.
Game is actually built to be aware of the Shared Video Memory. On a screenshot below it says that you have 4GB of Dedicated Video Memory, but it lets you to ignore this fact and go off-limit with an “Ignore Suggested Limits” setting.
With this turned on you’re able to use all other settings and go off the 4GB Dedicated Video Memory limit, so the game will use shared memory when dedicated is full.
It looks like the game doesn’t like going off limits of Dedicated VRAM anymore.
Someone said: Set “Ignore Suggested Limits” to off and the problem is gone!
And they’re right! Well… sort of…
It is true, but this setting just locks you to apply off-limit changes, so if you set it off, your settings will still be off-limit so it doesn’t really affect anything. But when you’ll decide to change settings, then you’ll get an off-limit warning.
BUT!
To fix crashes you actually NEED to go BELOW the limit! Don’t just lock it again, lower your settings!
For me even a little over-limit (like 60MB) can cause issues!
From my experience the less difference (by that I mean the difference between available dedicated VRAM and VRAM that game is going to use according to your game configuration) you have, the less crashes you have. This can be easily explained because 5066MB that you see on a screenshot marked as “used” is not actually used right away. You’ll reach this number over time. So if the difference is higher then you’ll reach the limit faster.
To me it looks like when you reach 4094MB limit the game fails to allocate shared video memory and crashes with 0xc0000005 code.
Are older patches affected?
Not at all. I also have cracked versions 1.41 and 1.50. Both have settings off-limit and both are filled with custom cars, which can be really VRAM-hungry. Zero issues here.