Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Crashes and memory leaks on Windows 7

I have MULTIPLE crashes while running the game on my home PC with Windows 7. In some cases Windows shows the low memory window (usually it does at some point before crash), sometimes not - in any case, the game crashes in a few minutes (sometimes offering to send a report via launcher, sometimes not).

The game launches only in DX11 mode, Vulkan just doesn't load. Also, after loading the game it requires a few seconds to calculate and apply lighting and animations, after the geometry and textures are loaded. Noticed also a funny glitch in launcher - when I double-click the "Launch" button, the game launches, when I single-click it, it does not.

The main issue, in any case, is overall stability on Windows 7. The game runs on my PC (i7-4770K, 16GB DDR3-2400, GF980GTX, Samsung 840 Pro SSD + Hitachi HDD) as a constant repeated "launch -> few minutes of gameplay -> crash" sequence. Constant "low memory" windows popping up suggest that something must be done with memory management, as I understand.

PLEASE FIX THIS ASAP!!!!!1

I have a setup pretty similar to yours, Windows 7 pro 64-bit (SP1), i7-4770K, 16 GB RAM, GTX 980 Ti, Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

I can't launch the game at all, I have to do the work-around by launching bg3_dx11.exe as admin, holding shift, and praying it would start (killing the process if it doesn't, and repeating the whole business until it finally starts after usually 3-10 times)... I tried double-clicking the "Play" button (it's "Play", do you see "Launch"?) but it makes no difference.

But once it starts, it's stable at the exception of the frequent freezes, it has never crashed in many hours of testing. I have never seen the low memory window.

Are you using the Steam version or the GOG version?

Are you sure that double-clicking "Launch" (or "Play"), you are not launching two instances of the game?

Do you have enough virtual memory?

Is that Windows 7 Pro, or another flavour ?

Maybe you can try by launching bg3_dx11.exe directly as admin, but I doubt it would change anything.

I use Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and Steam version of the game, with virtual memory (swap file, if I understand you correctly) disabled. I run the game as administrator, same as you. The game starts one process, not two, checked this several times. When I tried to launch it in fullscreen mode, it often started minimized and didn't opened the window, this was resolved by setting the video mode to pseudo-fullscreen. I even tried to update the video drivers (and my Windows Aero interface now rests in peace).

I also cannot run the game on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit... both drivers crash during startup, without ever bringing me to the main menu.

GOG version of game
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
Intel i7-3820 (Sandybridge-E)
NVidia GTX 1070ti
monitor: HP ZR30W 30" 2560x1600
32GB RAM
SSD: 970 Pro M.2 NVMe 1TB, over 400GB free.

With no swap file, your system has no way to keep more than 16 GB, and if I check how much is reserved once I load a game in BG3, I see that about 15 GB are already used.

That's just when starting after a fresh reboot of the system. I'm usually trying to keep it clean (thankfully it's easier with Windows 7 than Windows 10), so there's mainly an antivirus, nVidia's drivers and Chrome running (and what the OS is using). I can imagine that after a while, if there's a memory leak in their code (likely at this stage since they seem to use C++) or if it's poorly managed, the required memory will increase over time.

I'd try to set at least 8 GB of swap file and see if that solves the problem You seem to know your system, but just in case: System (Win+SysRq key), Advanced system settings, Advanced tab, Performance/Settings, Advanced, Virtual memory.

You can select on which drive it will be stored. If it's on your HDD, I'd recommend using the same value for 'Initial size' and 'Maximum size', so that the swap file doesn't change size all the time, which leads to disk fragmentation and degraded performances. If it's on an SSD, it's less important.

It's a different problam and I'm not sure why you are posting that here. It has been reported many times and I've tried to get through to the support about it, since it's quite the blocking bug, but without any success I'm afraid.

Check this post and this thread for the solution (though I gave it above...). I have to do several attempts before it succeeds, sometimes up to 10, so don't give up too early.
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=677714#Post677714

Your case seems to confirm it's happening on Pro versions of the OS (Win7 or Win10), could be an interesting clue.

I tried to enable the swap file on my HDD where the game is installed (not on system SSD, though) and it seems to fixed the crash problem. So, as a conclusion - either its real memory requirements are MUCH more than 16GB or there is too damn much memory leaks at its current state. My wife states that graphically the engine is virtually identical to Original Sin 2 (haven't tried the latter myself, so won't argue here), so the latter version seems true to me. Thanks all for a help and solution found!

Good news!
You're welcome

Well, I'm using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, *32GB RAM*, and all swap files enabled...
I still cannot run it at all, with *either* driver... cannot even get to main menu.

Time to upgrade guys. Windows 7 is obsolete. You will start getting lots of issues with games/drivers etc...
I would not deal with all that pain. Simply get win10.

Windows 7 is a great version in the Windows series, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. In comparison, Windows 10 is such a pain and a privacy concern, I'll change as late as I can.

It's not obsolete, still maintained by Microsoft, still supported by any vendor I know.

The problem Gorlash has (besides not reading others' posts and posting in the wrong thread) also occurs on Windows 10. It's a bug Larian should fix, but I have been unable to get their attention on this, we'll have to endure this bug much longer I'm afraid.