Hey everyone! I’ve been having “Rendering Device Lost” errors in OW for the past few months and I’ve probably lost a good 300 SR in penalties thanks to this problem. I’ve found a potential solution but let me add a disclaimer. This error occurs for a million different reasons, most pertaining to your GPU drivers or TdrDelay setting in your registry. Try this if you already tried cleanly uninstalling and reinstalling your drivers and adding a TdrDelay registry value. I’m sure many of you think, “OH THAT TOO SIMPLE OF A PROBLEM FOR ME TO HAVE”, but its better to eliminate every possibility.
[THE FIX]
In AMD’s Wattman settings, change your memory timing to timing level 2 instead of automatic. This fixed my crashing issue as well as made my framerate stable. Before I would get microstuttering and large framerate changes mid game despite my GPU not even reaching over 80% usage, and of course the infamous Rendering Device Lost crash.
Instructions:
If you are uncomfortable taking the risk involved in changing your GPU settings manually then don’t try this fix.
- Open Radeon Settings (Right click your desktop or find it in your task bar).
- Click Gaming, then Global settings.
- Click Global Wattman.
- Slide the bar to Custom.
- Scroll down to the memory section.
- Change the memory timing from “Automatic” to “Memory Timing Level 2”.
- Click Apply
[Other Advice]
Do not excessively overclock as I noticed that this will cause game crashes as well.
OW is very sensitive to OC (not as bad as some other games though), so if you continue getting this error, either revert to stock clocks or underclock a bit. On my card I underclock 3%.
If you have a Vega, increasing memory clock rather than core clocks helps way more with frame rates and stability but OW will crash if you push it too far.
[My set up]
ASUS ROG B350-F
Ryzen 5 2600x
Vega 64 LC (AMD Radeon 19.6.1)
EVGA G3 850W
16G Corsair LPX 3000mhz CL15
Windows 10 64bit
[Rant]
I spent a very, very long time trolling several different forums looking for a solution for this crash. I used DDU dozens of times, I updated all my drivers, I tried rolling the drivers back, I even wiped my drives and did a clean reinstall of windows.
One person on the interwebs had mentioned Overwatch is picky about its memory timings (I remember the comment said something about hash rates but that is beyond my understanding) so i decided to change the AMD Wattman setting off of automatic into Timing 2 and it worked perfectly. It was that simple. Before this I tried fine tuning all of my core clocks, memory clocks and voltages and I would get several different video driver crashes including “Rendering Device Lost”. Setting all voltages to auto, not pushing core clocks too far, and most importantly, changing the memory timing completely solved all issues for me.
I was so upset at these crashes. I’m making this post for two reasons. First of all, I want to help the community and second, I want to offer Blizzard their technical support staff an alternative framing for this error. I know that driver errors are attributable to many different issues but I have not seen anyone consider this “memory timing fix” anywhere.
Spread the word and bump the thread if it works for you!
Also Blizzard if this helps you, let my friends and I into the Vanilla beta please! 
