Blender Out of Memory Error When Rendering

How to fix it

Try these in order — the most common fix is first.

1. 1. Shrink textures

   Copy steps
   1. Downscale 8K or 4K maps to 2K where they are far from camera.
   2. Use File > External Data > Pack/Unpack only if needed; remove unused images.
   Did this fix it? Yes No

2. 2. Reduce geometry

   Copy steps
   1. Lower Subdivision Levels for Render in modifiers.
   2. Use Render Properties > Simplify and set Max Subdivision and Child Particles.
   3. Use instances or collections instead of duplicated meshes.
   Did this fix it? Yes No

3. 3. Free GPU memory

   Copy steps
   1. Close browsers and other GPU apps, restart Blender and render from the command line or a clean session.
   2. Blender will try to use system memory when VRAM is full, which is slower but still often beats CPU.
   Did this fix it? Yes No

4. 4. Fall back to CPU or split the render

   Copy steps
   1. Set Device to CPU if the scene needs more memory than the card has.
   2. Render in separate view layers and combine in the compositor.
   3. NVLink users can enable Distributed Memory Across Devices in preferences.
   Did this fix it? Yes No

Symptoms

Cycles stops with Error: Out of memory in CUDA/OptiX/HIP/Metal, or GPU renders become very slow.

Why it happens

• Large textures (an 8K image is about 256 MB, 4K 64 MB)
• Millions of polygons or heavy subdivision/displacement
• Particles, hair and volumes
• Other apps using VRAM
• Scene is bigger than card memory

This guide also covers

• blender out of memory
• blender cuda out of memory
• blender gpu out of memory
• blender render out of memory

Other Blender errors

• Blender Crashing When Rendering
• Blender GPU Not Detected / Not Showing in Preferences
• Blender CUDA / OptiX Error: Kernel Compilation Failed
• Blender Viewport Lag / Slow Viewport
• Blender Pink Textures / Missing Textures
• Blender FBX Export Textures Missing
• Blender glTF Export Missing Materials or Textures
• How to Recover Unsaved or Crashed Blender Files