Tested on Official Viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 and on Firestorm 7.2.2 (79439).

To reproduce; go to any area that would max out your VRAM.

As it currently stands, Windows is not stopping the viewer from using up ALL VRAM, including VRAM that's already in use by the OS or other applications. This causes the computer to slow down entirely, to a point of crashing to desktop, or sometimes even reaching BSOD. I can't imagine it's good for the hardware itself either.

In Firestorm, we can limit the VRAM the viewer can access, and this entirely removes the problem (when set to a reasonable amount so the system has some space, in my case from 24gb of VRAM to 16gb of VRAM, while the OS sucked up anywhere between 4 and 8.

I don't think this is a viewer issue, but a change in how Windows 11 deals with VRAM, however, the results are detrimental to the user experience.