Why do video games often crash when they have too many things on screen at once?

Question

Frame rate almost always drops but many times the game will crash as well. Why does this occur?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Wow first time I’ve been able to answer one of these. You won’t be able to generalize this to every game, but for the most part this causes the program to run out of memory. Every object on the screen needs to be tracked in memory, programs (and computers in general) have a limited amount of memory and when that limit is reached and the program tries to use more execution will fail causing the game to crash.