Despite the fact that it’s only January, God of War is already looking to potentially be one of the best PC games released this year. While receiving pretty much universal praise on Steam, however, a number of users have encountered a rather annoying issue. Namely, when they attempted to boot it up, rather than it loading as it should, it instead crashed giving a somewhat bizarre ‘out of memory’ error. Certainly not ideal for a title you just spent a good chunk of change on!
Following an official post on the games Steam website, however, the developers have not only identified what they believe to be the cause of the problem, but they are also offering users a potential hotfix workaround while a patch to completely resolve the issue is put together.
God of War – “Out of Memory”
So, what’s the problem? Well, although still pending 100% confirmation, it would appear that the issue is currently only being found by people using Intel’s latest Alder Lake-S processors and specifically those that feature an integrated graphics adaptor. Put simply, it would appear that although attempting to display on the dedicated graphics card, the game is accidentally getting pushed towards the integrated one resulting in its rather limited VRAM getting gobbled up beyond capacity immediately. Hence, the ‘out of memory’ error.
While a patch is on the way to hopefully fix this permanently, however, God of War’s PC developers may have found a potential workaround those users can at least attempt in the meantime.
How to Try the Hotfix!
The developers have made it abundantly clear that the hotfix is very new and undergoing testing. As such, while they hope it will help resolve the problem, they can’t guarantee its success for everyone. – So, with that little disclaimer out of the way, if you are getting an ‘out of memory’ error, they have suggested placing the game in an ‘experimental’ beta mode. To do this, follow the steps below:
- In your Steam library, right click on ‘God of War’ and select ‘Properties’
- Select the ‘BETAS’ tab
- Change the drop down to ‘experimental’
If you do not see the branch in your drop-down, please restart your Steam client.
To switch back to the default branch, follow these steps:
- In your Steam library, right click on ‘God of War’ and select ‘Properties’
- Select the ‘BETAS’ tab
- Change the drop down to ‘none’
As above, they’re certainly not guaranteeing that this will work for everyone. On the plus side, however, it is nice to see the problem not only getting quickly identified but more so them already having a temporary fix/workaround in place to try and help resolve it in the short term.
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
