Halloween Update - Sudden Frequent "Rendering Device" Crashes

Technical Support
1

To start, I started experiencing “Your rendering device has been lost” crashes for the first time last month. They started when I updated to a 1080 Ti and 1440p 144hz monitor. I had no crashing prior, while using a GTX 970 and 1080p 60hz monitor.

I fixed the crashing by the below combination of items:

  • Used two different power rails from PSU for the Video Card
  • Adjusted Windows Power Management to High Performance
  • In Nvidia Control Panel, set Power Management Mode to “Prefer Maximum Performance”
  • Enabled Superfetch
  • Disabled “Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device” on playback devices
  • Used DDU to wipe Video and Sound drivers, and installed fresh drivers

No one item specifically stopped the crashing, but all of them combined seemed to do the trick.

Then came the Halloween update today… and now I cannot get through a single match without a “Your rendering device has been lost” crash. Because I had almost fully resolved the crashing prior to this update, I have reason to believe something in this update is causing it this time.

I ran some GPU-Z traces while playing to pinpoint what happened during the crashes. Both traces I have from a crash, GPU-Z stops pulling any reads from the card after the crash occurs.

Anyone else having this issue? Anything behind the scenes that you can see? I have no crash logs in my Overwatch Logs folder Since September 22nd…

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after almost a year with out this being a problem, I just finished the update about 30 minutes ago and have had it happen 4 times already. 2 times just sitting in the menu, 2 times in game. it crashed before I even got to try and play, i managed to finish 1 match, and made it about 30 seonds into the second match and it started again. Either there will be another patch tomorrow or blizzard will put the blame on overheating and overclocking like they normally do. Nothing has changed in the last 2 months until the patch tonight and suddenly its broken. gaming on an rx580 @ 1080p 60hz.

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I have the “rendering device lost” crash issue too. I have not touched the default settings of my pc since I bought it. So they’re wrong to blame it on that.

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4

If you’re using Nvidia and your driver version is 416.16 try to roll back the driver to 411.70 this fixed the problem for me.

  1. Right-click on windows 10 start menu.
  2. Select Device Manager.
  3. Click the Dropdown for display adapters and right click -> Properties on Nvidia Geforce.
  4. Go to Driver Tab and select Roll Back Driver.
5

I’m glad to hear that helped you, and hope it will help others experiencing this issue.

Unfortunately, it’s not applicable for my scenario. Part of my troubleshooting for the original crashing was to do a fresh install of a known-working driver version, so I’m currently at 378.92. When I was in the 4XX.XX versions of drivers, I had constant crashes.

6

I never had any problem until the patch event today … 5 crashs in less than 10min in comp game …

Good job Blizzard … You’re awesome … (this one is a sarcasm … )

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7

Only been able to get the game to load in and playable once since the patch and I’ve tried about 20+ times to load the game. It keeps crashing citing graphics driver issue. I’ve cleaned them out, reinstalled new ones, tried reverting, uninstalled Overwatch and reinstalled, nothing fixes it.

8

Been crashing all night as well. Coincidentally I kept crashing on wave 11 on Junkenstein’s Endless. One time it straight up gave me the blue screen of death for Windows 10 and forced my PC to reboot. Every other time was crash to desktop.

9

I have never had this issue until this Halloween update. Now every game I am in crashes and gives me a rendering device lost error. I even rolled back my driver to Nvidia 411.70 and the crashes keep happening.

1 Like
10

Getting the “rendering device has been lost” crash-to-desktop rather frequently since the Halloween update, but never had any crash before. The only thing that actually changed on my system was OW itself, so I’m pretty confident in putting the blame on it. (Might also be Windows things though. You never know.)

At the time of crashing, a warning message in Windows’ eventvwr.exe is generated stating the display driver “nvlddmkm” wouldn’t respond anymore, and was recovered. The Overwatch.log in My Documents only seems to be about voice comms, so no luck there. (Funny enough, the voice comm system seems to be shut down properly.)

The strange thing is, these crashes happen completely randomly. I had some in intense teamfights, I had some during team composition phase, heck I even had one right when the main menu transitioned to the loading screen once. I can sometimes play for half an hour, sometimes it crashes right after starting up again when trying to rejoin the match. It’s impossible for me right now to pinpoint it down to anything specific.

On top of all that I sometimes (rarely) see graphical glitches where parts of the map turn pitch black, as if they’re not even getting rendered at all. In one extreme case the whole game suddenly went black and white (actually just black and white, not grayscale), with terrain and heroes being pitch black and the sky and shields being completely solid white. This might be related, as I’ve never had anything like this before Halloween either. Screenshots: imgur. com/a/Q2V483a (remove the space)

Internet resources suggest updating / reinstalling the graphics driver, but under every post that suggests it there are five stating it didn’t help. Another one I found analyzed a BSOD dump and found that that specific crash happened somewhere in DirectX, not the actual driver, and suggested running sfc /scannow in an admin cmd. This however did not find any integrity violations on my PC.

Oh and by the way:
i7-4770K with on-chip graphics disabled in BIOS
GTX 1080 with driver 398.36
Windows 10 Pro 1803

TL;DR: Something with the newest OW patch is causing the graphics card / driver to crash, and it doesn’t seem to matter which driver version or brand of graphics card you have.

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Just crashed again right after wave 12 on Endless Junkenstein on nvidia patch 411.70. Going to try and rollback to the patch before that.

3272D088-7204-4B07-9A61-9CAA2F65D24F

At least I got the achievement I guess…

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What Hz is your monitor?

13

Just downloaded the latest patch and crashed after about 2 minutes in my first game.

EDIT: Perhaps this is related specifically to the Junkenstein’s Revenge game mode? I was able to play about 20 minutes of Total Mayhem without a crash.

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@Horse: 144Hz with G-Sync. I do get quite stable ~150 FPS ingame, and the settings are by now almost at the lowest possible level (tbh I don’t even see a real difference).

@brawkoli: Definitely not, I had numerous crashes in quick and competitive play. As I said though, these are random and I often enough get through about half an hour of playing just fine.

So I went and set up an environment on my Arch Linux install where I could play (linux-ck 4.18.12 + nvidia driver 410.57 + wine-esync 3.16-staging + dxvk 0.80), and I just had a ~2,5h play session of QP and mystery heroes without a single crash. Unfortunately the framerate is not quite stable enough for me to dive into competitive, but I guess it’s better than playing under Windows and crashing every few minutes.

Oh yeah, and due to this I hadn’t had the time to test the newest patch under Windows yet.

15

After today’s patch…

Spectated a game of Junkenstein’s revenge for almost 20 minutes. No crash.

When I played Junkenstein’s, had a crash within the first 5 minutes.

16

I’ve never been able to start the game since this new patch. 5 times out of 5 crashes since yesterday. I thought it was about the msi afterburner being run because some games, e.g., PUBG, had this exact problem when starting up the game as well. Thus turning off the overclock did the trick back then but not this time.

17

I have personally been getting the rendering device lost error for many months and have been troubleshooting it for over 2 months now (it initially appeared for me back in May for the first time ever.) It is definitely a TDR issue (according to the memory dumps), at least in my case, though it ONLY occurs in this game and not with any other programs or games.

I basically did everything suggested on the forums to try and fix it (including the TDR registry fixes and testing PSU) and eventually, about a week ago, I had seemed to stabilize the issue so that it was no longer happening after I updated and unlocked my bios, custom set my memory speed and underclocked both my CPU and GPU. While underclocking really shouldn’t be necessary for a GTX 980M to work with Overwatch that is running far below what would be considered high operating temperatures (~47-55 °C, down from the 65-72 °C that was typical before I was underclocking and running my fans full blast), it at least wasn’t occurring anymore even after having the game open for over 9-10 hours. This was at least something of a win, considering before I was getting a TDR anywhere from immediately after launching Overwatch in the main menu to 3-4 hours later and everywhere in between.

Then, the yesterday update/fix (for the bugged UI) comes and after downloading it, the TDR rendering lost issue occurs 3 times in the span of 6 hours. The issue went from fixed to completely back with one patch/update from Blizzard (nothing else had changed.)

Based on my past experiences with this issue as well as when this issue reappeared, I think there is a very good chance that the rendering device lost issue is occuring due to some problem with Overwatch’s UI and Menus. This is considering that the TDR returned due to a patch that (at least as far as I understand) was meant only to fix some bug in the UI that occurred after the Halloween Event started as well as the fact that although I could get the TDR crash occasionally during in-progress matches, this happens very rarely, and for the entire time I’ve had the issue the great majority of crashes occur in the main menu or while transitioning between matches and menus. Sometimes it will even occur right after having started the computer up and almost immediately crash the display driver in the main menu.

All this really suggests there is something wrong with Overwatch, and like I said, some of the problems may very possibly lie in the implementation of the UIs and menus. I get that the rendering device lost error is kind of a catch-all error that can be caused by many things, but this problem is just going to keep arising and leading to an angry playerbase if Blizzard support just keeps assuming it’s some problem with the player’s machine (over clocking, power, etc.)I and don’t properly investigate/deal with what appears to be a very clear problem that ONLY shows up with their application and nothing else. Honestly, even if the bug/error is something that is wrong with Nvidia’s drivers or Windows 10 uptimately, there is something to be said about the fact that every other game and program seems to be navigating that problem fine, while Overwatch (which is not even that intensive comparably) can’t seem to deal with it.

2 Likes
18

I agree with all of that. Very frustrating that we ourselves are forced to troubleshoot a seemingly very common issue. Due to hundreds of potential causes, troubleshooting takes weeks and demands you to have decent computer knowledge. I feel major empathy for those who have this issue and have to give up playing Overwatch, because they don’t have the ability to attempt to fix it on their own.

It’s only Overwatch that is creating these TDR conditions in the first place. No other games I play have this issue. If I truly had failing hardware, power issues, clocking issues - then I should have that behavior in other games too.

And when we put forth all this effort to make this game run stable, a simple patch comes out and ruins all the hard work. And no one from Blizzard support even acknowledges the reports of it.

Beyond frustrated.

19

I too am now just having this issue. Haven’t tried rolling back my driver yet, but it seems this only works sometimes… Can we get “This is a bug/we are working on it”, so we know the Devs have acknowledged this.

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The sad part is even if we did get some input, it’d probably just turn out like all the others. Generally disregarded. Except of course with a “have you tried the things in this forum” and “post your system information here” into the forum void.

The truth is, I am getting tired of troubleshooting, and I’m really getting to the point where, even though I really liked the game, I just really don’t want to bother anymore. It’s starting to feel like Blizzard’s priorities are really messed up. Fixing an issue that is this widespread should really be high priority - your customers should be able to play the game they bought. I understand bugs and issues and incompatibilities to an extent, but there really should not be a problem like this for so long that still has not been fixed for a very large amount of people.

I’m almost at the point where I won’t just stop playing Overwatch, but I won’t ever buy any Blizzard product ever again and encourage everyone I know to do the same.