[FIXED] Failed to lock vertex buffer error

[UntrustedNoob]

So i've been on this problem for almost a month now, and i doubted the error was from my laptop specs since they're more than enough for the game.

From searching around i concluded that you can experience this problem in many games. Personally i experienced it with Garry's Mod and here's what i found was causing the problem and how to solve it.


After contacting FacePunch Support, they told me:

"Garry's Mod is an old 32bit game, so it can only use 3GB of RAM max, even if you have more installed. Combined with usually huge RolePlay maps they eat up the 3 GB very fast and end up crashing the game. This can happen to random players - some can play and some can't on those servers"

So its obvious we want to reduce the RAM used by the game to avoid this error (which was my conclusion).

How To Solve The Error

First of all, make sure you've tried lowering your in-game video graphics. High video graphics will consume more RAM which is what we are trying to avoid. This did improve the performance of the game in my case as it was loading into servers faster.

So there are multiple things you could try doing and here's everything i've tried:

Step 1

Open your library in steam>Right click on the game from the library>Properties>Set Launch Options. Now there are multiple commands you would want to try for this one. Here's a list of the commands i tried.

-dxlevel 80
-dxlevel 90
-dxlevel 95

The following commands are used to downgrade your DirectX used for the game to DirectX 8 or DirectX 9 (Mine was DirectX 12)


FOR GARRY'S MOD ONLY

+gmod_mcore_test 1 -gl

This other command however, makes the game run on OpenGL instead of DirectX, suggested to me by a fellow user who also said "Opengl is known to give FPS boosts to Garry's Mod and that other launch parameter I added turns your Garry's Mod multithreaded so it helps your FPS more"


Now try launching the game again. Still doesn't work? Well here's something else you could try.

Step 2

IF YOU DON'T HAVE AN NVIDIA GRAPHICS CARD IGNORE THIS STEP

First of all, make sure your Graphics card has the latest update. This can by opening GeForce Experience, if you don't have it here's a download link from geforce's official website https://www.geforce.com/geforce-experience/download


Now once you've got it installed and all, open GeForce Experience (preferred to run as administrator) > Then Click on DRIVERS in the top left corner. Click on "Check for Updates" in the top right, it will automaticall download if there's an update but it won't install automaticall, you have to click Install on that window.

The next step won't harm but i do it just in case. GeForce Experience usually detects the games you have on your Computer

There's an option where you can choose to optimize the game so in GeForce Experience:

Click on HOME > Go ahead to the game with the problem (Garry's Mod in my case). You'll find a green button that has OPTIMIZE written on it. Click on that and lets move on to the next step

Go to NVIDIA Control Panel (if you can't find where that is, go to your computer's Control Panel then search for NVIDIA Control Panel)

Click on Manage 3D Settings>Program Settings>Add (then add the game with the problem, if it's Garry's Mod then you'll find it named hl2.exe)

Now once you've added the game, you'll notice there's "2. Select the preferred graphics processor for this program:"

Choose Integrated Graphics since it also reduces the consumption of RAM for the game. Unlike the High-performance NVIDIA processor option.

Click on Apply.


Now after doing all this try launching the game and see if its working.


If the game's not working you can try contacting the support. Steam will usually give you a link to the game developer's website.Link to Steam Support: https://help.steampowered.com/en/

Feel free to leave a comment if you're experiencing a difficulty with these steps or if you'd like to add something.

Thank you for reading and hope this works :)

[kolanjijordan]

THIS DOESN'T WORK FOR ME

[Mike]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.