Here’s a fix it seems to be working for me. It may not work for everybody else but I haven’t had a issue in awhile now. I think for me it was the windows game mode causing the issue. I disabled it and I haven’t had an issue yet.
Right-click the Start button.
Click Settings.
Click Gaming.
On the left click Game bar and turn it off
On the left click Game DVR And turn off Background recording and recorded audio.
That’s pretty much all i have done. Let us know if it works for you like it did for me.
I have had the same issue for a while now. Renaming the “Overwatch.exe” to “OverwatchTest.exe” seems to fix it. However there are a few annoyances about this fix.
- You have to login each time you launch the game
- You have to launch the game by double clicking the “OverwatchTest.exe” instead of using the Battle Net launcher
- When the game has an update you will get an error saying “Cannot connect to game server” to resolve this:
a. Update the “Overwatch.exe”
b. Delete your old “OverwatchTest.exe”
c. Rename the new updated “Overwatch.exe” back to “OverwatchTest.exe”
This should now allow you to connect to the game server again as normal since your executable should be on the latest version.
I would love if a fix could be found by Blizzard and/or Nvidia. It seems to be Nvidia or potentially both parties who would be needed to resolve it. I feel it is most likely the Nvidia driver as the error does state “Rendering Device has been lost” which references your graphics card. Also the exact same executable has completely normal results (At least for me) once it is renamed which indicates that there is nothing wrong with how Overwatch is running. It points to how your graphics card is treating the file named “Overwatch.exe”.
My suspicion is the Nvidia driver recognizes the name “Overwatch.exe” and tries to run it a specific way. Once you name it “OverwatchTest.exe” it is no longer recognized and is treated with default behavior and in turn resolves the issue.
Hope this helps anyone having an issue! Yes I know this fix comes with some annoyances, but it is a fix that has worked for me so I recommend trying it. I am sure the dev teams are doing their best to resolve this. Being a developer myself I understand how hard it can be to track down errors, their causes, and how to resolve them. Especially when they are inconsistent such as this error.
If this fix works for you please share so the community can continue to enjoy this fantastic game!
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please can there just be a fix to this already, I’m tired of crashing every single day playing competitive. lol - the game’s bad enough as it is, idk how it’s taking so long to fix this issue
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Been having the same issues here too. Just randomly happens in the middle of comp games. I used to never have the issue but ever since a certain update a while back in overwatch it started happening. I figured it was just a bug or something and it would be sorted out in a future update but it never was resolved. Now I lose comp games just at random times because of the crash, and even worse I get banned from the matches and can’t rejoin the game I was in. If I try to join back I won’t be able to in time because my pc took to long to process the crash.
For some icing on the cake, some players may report me for griefing because it looks like I just went afk and left for no reason just to make them lose. Even though that wasn’t my intention at all, it was just a crash from “rendering device lost”, followed by a disconnect. To make matters worse, when a player leaves there is no substitute whatsoever. Not even a bot replacement to take your spot temporarily until you can reconnect. The game becomes a 5v6, and your team most of the time loses despite their best efforts (they can still win but it’s so much tougher). In every scenario you lose, unless your the enemy team (then I suppose that’s a free win for you.)
https:// eu.forums.blizzard. com/en/overwatch/t/possible-fix-for-rendering-device-lost/18234
(just delete the spaces)
This problem startet for me recently as well (maybe 2 month ago).
First in the manner of once a month, meanwhile between every 4 to 10 matches. I have a GTX 1080 FE, so no RTX here.
Nothing big changed on this PC on the software or hardware side. Only an Win10 update from v1803 to v1903 and Nvidia driver updates.
I have no problem whatsoever with other games. It is also not a temp issue, my card is custom loop watercooled and never gets hotter than 48°C.
I stress tested my pc a lot with different programs the last couple of days to make sure it is stable.
So no more comp. for me as well then. Such a shame.
Blizzard could at least fetch the app crashes and revert the punishments once it is proven that the game really crashed, instead u get punished for everything all the time. Very broken system. But i think this could be abused as well.
Check you CPU (not GPU) temp, if they are fine and during fights with lot of things going on, that it does not peak around 95°C, that can make your Card crash (i know it sounds odd).
2nd thing is to uninstall Logitech (or similar) gaming apps.
Set up your mouse etc as you want but then uninstall it. It makes the game crash with the render device lost error.
it actually works ,thank you very much dude
CPU stays around 51° (also watercooled). So no problem there. Like is said, stresstested the hell out of the system and no problems whatsoever in other games. Even way more demanding games with uncapped framerates have no problem.
I’m playing Overwatch with this setup since years and never had this error before, it just started recently after updating windows and the nvidia drivers.
This is now happening to me
it started a few days ago its happend twice
my GPU and CPU are going cool as normal
Its a RTX 2070
I give up. This thing destroyed my will to play. Lost a lot of ranked points because of it. No visible solution, an this is the only game of tens of others that I play and only in Overwatch I have this problem. Goodbye.
This is just stupid, I never had any problem with my gtx 970. Got an RTX 2070 and every 2 or 3 games i crash, i reboot pc and I can’t even reconnect wth?
This has apparently been going on for ages and there is still no fix? Gj Blizzard, they can at least repley
Like really blizzard, i got a damn brand new CPU and GPU and this bs wont stop. my computer is better than what u guys got in the OWL and i cant even load in anymore. Tried whatever u recommended to do and still wont work. Everything in my pc is compatible so it isnt on my end. blizzard just f’ing fix it.
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I don’t like overwatch enough to keep playing with this issue.
I have an Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB and an Intel i5. I started experiencing this problem since the last update. Monitored temp levels, updated drivers, done everything as suggested and still get crashes mid-game where the whole screen freezes and turns black, reporting no signal from my DisplayPort cable; followed by a recovery where it then tells me the rendering device has been lost. The system will also do a full auto-reboot if the signals been lost for long enough; losing any unsaved work in the process; making it really unsafe to play the game in it’s current state.
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For some reason my friend and I got this as well, the game auto-set Render Scale to above 100%, we both moved it back to 100% and put some other things lower, like Shadow Quality, Effects Quality, and some other things that would be totally noticeable mid-fight. I want to say it’s due to Render Scale but as I do not work at Blizzard nor am I an actual video game creator, I cannot say for sure. But Render Scale worked for us.
This just happened to me too. Kicked me right out of a competitive match. I loaded the game straight away and I wasn’t even given the option to rejoin. I was literally gone for 15 seconds and the game gave me a suspension.
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Hello,
I also have this problem + other random crashes. My driver is up to date, installed it with a clean installation via Nvidia GeForce Exp.
My config:
Intel i7-4771
GTX 1060 6GB
16GB RAM
I am a PC Specialist in another gaming company and I can tell this is a game bug.
Blizzard you owe me some rank points since I lost my matches due to the random crashes. Please fix your bugs!
If you need other details from me to debug this stuff, please send me a message and I will help!
Cheers,
C.
hey brother
The exact same thing happened to me a few days ago. Wasn’t able to rejoin and lost a lot of points due to that crash… It’s frustrated when you’re trying so hard to rank up and every won match counts, and then you lose points due to Blizz bugs that they can’t fix. AND the amount of lost points was like I lost 3 matches or so. Not fair! They should at least detect when your game crashed and not tax you! I even had the pop-up with the crash report which was sent to them after my game crashed, and they can’t even detect that!
Fast approaching the 1 year mark and still not fixed 
Great job by Blizzard and Nvidia at getting this issue resolved. All mouths shut bar getting your customers to try figure it out for ye.
It’s easy to ignore something by merging it all into one thread as they do here or in Nvidia’s case just ‘act’ dumb about it.
Absolutely embarrassing stuff… still!
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