Overwatch (specifically) keeps crashing my GPU randomly - "Application has been blocked from accessing Graphics hardware"

Technical Support
1

i.imgur(dot)com/DPQYxqw.png

This is a screenshot of Windows telling me (over 20+ times in a row) that “Overwatch.exe has been blocked from accessing Graphics hardware”. No other game has given me this issue except for Overwatch and I play a lot things, including Destiny 2, HotS, HS and D3.

i.imgur(dot)com/6WuEsel.png

Here’s a screenshot of my Event Viewer from when it happened. I checked it out and it’s showing error 4101 (display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding) three times in a row, then error 4109 (Overwatch.exe has been blocked from accessing Graphics hardware) about 40 times. It was stuck in an error loop for a while before I finally had to hold the power button and kill my PC. Normally when this happens, it just freezes my entire machine and then I have to kill it anyway.

This issue occurs almost every time I play OW and I need to know what’s causing it or how to fix it. I’ve lost so much SR from the game crashing during competitive matches that I will never get back to where I was. Not to mention that when this happens, my entire PC freezes and I have to hold the power button to restart it.

Please help.

  • Windows 10, up-to-date
  • Nvidia GTX 980 GPU, also up-to-date drivers
  • 16GB RAM
  • i7-7700K CPU
2

While this could just be a driver error (the latest nVidia drivers are actually causing problems for many people, and you should roll them back to something from mid-September), it sounds a bit more serious if your entire system is crashing.

What error are you seeing in the Windows Event Viewer under system logs? There should be some critical errors appearing there.

3

Hey @Nicole, thanks for the response.

I’m glad you asked about Event Viewer. I checked it out and it’s showing error 4101 (display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding) three times in a row, then error 4109 (Overwatch.exe has been blocked from accessing Graphics hardware) about 40 times. It was stuck in an error loop for a while before I finally had to hold the power button and kill my PC. Normally when this happens, it just freezes my entire machine and then I have to kill it anyway.

Here’s a screenshot of my Event Viewer from when it happened.

i.imgur(dot)com/6WuEsel.png

The strange thing is that I’ve had this issue even before updating my drivers. It’s kind of been an on-going issue with Overwatch over the last year that I’ve never been able to solve. I just assumed my GPU was the issue, but no other games crash my system like this.

I don’t mind rolling back my drivers, but do you have a specific, known to be good version that I should look for? I’m currently using 416.34

Thanks for your time.

4

It’s possible the windows defender or another antivirus blocking access to the GPU, the game’s not running in admin mode, or it could just be the crashes making it unavailable.

As for the stable drivers, I don’t have the specific version number because I am not experiencing these issues myself, but if you can find the one released in mid-September (prior to 10/03/2018 to be specific), that would be fine. It helped other users here on the forums, so I’m hoping that remedies your issue too.

5

I’ll see what I can do @Nicole. I’m afraid to roll back my GPU drivers for a single game in fear that it might cause issues for other games I play or OBS when I stream, but I might try it just to see if it fixes Overwatch since that’s what I play the most. I’ve just been having this random crash issue for so long now that my hopes aren’t very high.

Thanks for trying to help!