Overwatch crashing mid-game competitive on PC

Hi community!

Okay, so I’ve been having this odd issue for a few months now already. I think it started around May or beginning of June this year.

Symptoms: Gameplay graphics freeze, audio keeps playing, I can hear voice chat and abilities. Alt+Tab does nothing but Windows start menu works fine. Task manager opens but I can’t use it because it won’t overlay the game screen (I think I solved this one with running OW in windowed borderless mode).

This only happens in competitive as far as I know. It has happened during finding match, competitive loading screen, hero pick phase, pre-game phase and mid-game. The only solution is to restart my computer (lately I have been able to kill the process using task manager after switching to windowed mode). When it happens mid-game I usually can get back within 2 minutes but most of the time it happens during the phase when I get a suspension and -50 SR loss during disconnection.

I have an Asus ROG Strix GL502VM laptop with

  • i7-7000HQ
  • GTX 1060
  • 8 GB of RAM
  • 128 GB SSD (game is on that one)
  • 1 TB HDD

I have tried the following without any luck

  • Repair game
  • Reinstall game
  • Shut down battle net app in the background
  • Run game in borderless windowed mode
  • Disable nvidia overlay
  • Reinstall latest graphics drivers
  • Uninstall and reinstall graphics drivers completely
  • Run memtest86 - nothing came up from that, everything was green

The only thing that has worked so far is when I restart my computer just before starting my gaming session. Then I can run fine for an hour. If I take a break for a few hours and start the game again it’s pretty much guaranteed to crash in the next 15-20 minutes.

I have not noticed this in other games but then again I play Overwatch almost exclusively. I have been playing Fortnite BR at occasions if I don’t feel like playing overwatch or when I’m suspended due to this bug and have not noticed this happen in Fortnite. Also, it has never happened in Arcade and I don’t recall it happening in Quick Play (maybe once at most).

If anyone has encountered something similar or has any ideas what else I should try (I guess full Windows 10 reset is also an option) please let me know.

Thank you!

2 Likes
  • Try an older driver. I never auto-update things that don’t require latest version- this provides stability on my machine without unexpected crashes. E.g.: I have nvidia driver version 391.35 while the latest for my GPU is 416.34. Why would I update it? Everything is fine with the old driver and with the new one I’d get nothing but potential problems.
  • Don’t install a lot of cr*p on your machine. Different software components can easily interfere on a windows machine. I’m in a good position with this because I have a dedicated machine on which I installed only the games I play and nothing else. If the reason is a messed up windows then you might have to reinstall. If you do this then try to install bare minimum software and try overwatch that way. Then install the other required things one-by-one by trying overwatch regularly to be able to tell which new thing screws up overwatch.
  • The most trivial way software can interfere on a machine is eating away memory from each other. If a program runs out of memory then it usually crashes or starts misbehaving before crashing. Your machine has 8GB which is the bare minimum I’d buy into a machine on which I wanted to play overwatch.
  • Antivirus/security software might prevent overwatch and/or other games from operating normally.

Thanks a lot for your help, TRON.

Please xenover, try the following, apart from what TRON mentioned.

Make sure you deactivate Xbox DVR:
battle.net/support/article/92046

Close background applications to make sure there’s no other program interfering with the game:
battle.net/support/article/23848

Delete the Battle.net Cache folder:
battle.net/support/article/34721

Repair the game:
battle.net/support/article/7655

If the issue persists, please create your DxDiag and MSInfo files:
battle.net/support/article/12988

You can paste the content of each file on a web like Pastebin and provide us with the links. If it doesn’t let you publish your message because of the links, try to paste them using the preformatted text option (</> button).


Got feedback about the support I’m providing? Leave your comments here!

ye maybe it would be time for blizzard to fix things… seriously having freezes during competitive only that i can’t get rid off in any other way than restarting the pc. quickplay always worked fine so far. I even bought completely new hardware (mainboard, gpu, ram, cpu, everything new) because it happened and now after having played fine for some time it started happening again yesterday. really aweesomly just sucks big time. maybe blizzard should worrry about the latest drivers, surely not the job of the gamers. all other games work fine, even the blizzard ones, but overwatch competitive SUCKS when it comes to crashing the pc nearly every game and i’ve wasted hours (actually weeks!) trying to fix this! so at some point in time, maybe blizzard should do their job as well. I’m running the game at 165 fps/hz and my computer is doing an absolute awesome job in everything else (games, game dev, everything else!) but ow comp -.-

2 Likes

Sorry for replying so late. I forgot about this issue completely because I started restarting my PC before my gaming sessions and so far it has worked just fine. Until yesterday that is.

Anyway. I have tried even refreshing my Windows installation but that did not aid either.

Here is the DxDiag.txt file www(dot)upload(dot)ee/files/9407040/DxDiag.txt.html
and the MSInfo.txt file www(dot)upload(dot)ee/files/9407025/MSInfo.txt.html (sorry, that’s in Estonian mostly).

I think I haven’t 100% tried the closing ALL background applications but that’s a bit difficult since there are windows background processes running as well. I can try closing all app installed by me.

E: I managed to take a process dump of an Overwatch.exe right after the graphics froze. Would it be of any assistance? The downside is that the file is over 5GB large so I’m not sure where to upload it.

I am having this same crashing issue. Everything is perfect on my laptop, but on my brand new, just built desktop, I cant take 5 steps into any mode without crashing. I’m currently waiting for chkdsk to finish since I’ve been getting blue-screened 1 out of 5 crashes. The only thing I have left to try is to disable overlays, but then what?

been fighting this “crashing thing “for ages , nothing helps . Tried all the above steps and nothing,reinstalled windows updated grafic drivers ,underclocker my cpu etc. I got 1 account suspended because blizzard counts crashing as leaving ,so I bought a new game- same thing"non stop crashes”. Let’s be honest since when u have to do all those steps on any game to prevent crashing ? played CSS for 10 years and had no problems or any other game for that matter. I even manage to contact blizzard support and that didn’t help either …Long story short , game has many bugs since day one , if u type in google search " overwatch crashes” u’ll get thousands of posts with complains about it. I think that a 30 billion dollar company should manage to fix few bugs ,so us mere mortals could enjoy the game …have a nice day

2 Likes

How dare you ask Devs to put more work than necessary into a game that is free after you buy it? How dare you expect a company to respond to a common problem across the board with various customers and not act assuming their game is malfunctioning? How dare you provide all the evidence to the contrary and believe anyone will do anything differently?

Note the sarcasm? Good, because a lot of people are getting tired of trying to play a game that has such a weak security alg. I just caught another team’s tank going afk long enough to cause their team (Who was winning in Paris on Payload) to c9 or fail to be on point just so they could type something that never entered chat. Meanwhile, I was returning from spawn and suddenly BSOD stared me in the face, I shut my computer down because I know it wasn’t overheated, I was watching the temp. 52 degrees C, low/medium settings with a 1060 and everything else but Overwatch shut off or running at low priority (Except my antivirus of course which is Malwarebytes and its the same antivirus Blizzard suggests). I get back in time fast, because my computer isn’t junk, and return in time to hear my team screaming at me for leaving mid game. I’m sick of doing everything that I can as a customer to use the software (Overwatch) I paid for appropriately while Blizzard does nothing to reinforce their security.

Hackers play your games Blizzard, it happens all the time, players catch them red-handed and you guys rarely do a thing about it. Reinforce the security of your servers so Hackers have a harder time going through it, finding player’s IP addresses, and setting off crashes that don’t even make sense.

I purchased a brand new PC early 2018. Bought the parts one-by-one and assembled it myself. (i5 8600k, 16G RAM, GTX 1060). I played a lot in 2018 often the whole day and got random reboots in Overwatch. Only in Overwatch. Sometimes once a day, sometimes every 10 minutes, totally random. Experimented a lot with my system settings and Overwatch settings double check ed the PC for loose cables but nothing worked and every measurement seemed to be fine (CPU/GPU usage/temp).

A few months later I purchased a much larger CPU cooler: replaced my NH-D9L to an NH-D15. The same very good brand in much larger size. (The NH-D9L weighs 428g while the NH-D15 is 980g.). Since then I didn’t have a single reboot during the last one and a half year. The temperature readings are roughly the same. (My guess would be that those temperate sensors aren’t 100% reliable on some motherboards or in case of insufficient cooling your CPU might overheat other parts of the board that don’t have temp sensors installed.)

A game that works for most people can’t be blamed for crashing on a cr**pily built PC. The fact that the PC might not crash with other games doesn’t matter. Actually a game that is well optimised for the average consumer hardware will be able to put more strain on the PC due to being able to use most of its resources (e.g.: CPU, GPU, memory) to the max. In contrast a less optimised game that quickly runs into a bottleneck with one particular resource (e.g.: CPU) might under-utilise other things too that results in less strain on the machine. Games don’t call graphics functions (through the video drivers) the exact same way in the exact same order with similar parameters (you can’t expect that), but a driver shouldn’t crash with any combination. If it crashes then it’s the driver’s fault not the application’s that calls it.

Heya TRON,

Cheers for the feedback on this thread it’s very solid information. I’m just locking this out as it is rather old and it would be best that it’s not continually necro’d. Please feel free to contribute on any current posts though. :+1: