You landed on this page because the game detected an error and terminated.

This occurs, when the game lost access to the physical graphics device (i.e. the GPU). See the section at the end for further technical background information, if you are interested.

There can be multiple problems causing this situation. Some can be triggered by bugs in the game, others are triggered by system/driver issues.
Please follow the following troubleshooting steps to try to resolve the issue if the problem occurs frequently (i.e. isn't a one time issue) for you.

Overclocked system

An overclocked system is the most probable cause for running into this problem. If you overclocked the system (most relevant would be an overclocked GPU, though the same issue can also occur when overclocking the CPU and/or the RAM), please revert the overclocking again and see if this resolves the problem.

Driver issues

The problem can also be caused by driver issues. Especially beta drivers are known to cause instabilities and trigger the temporary loss of a device. We therefore recommend that you install the latest recommended (or optional — but NOT beta) version of your graphics card drivers.
You can find the official drivers here:

• AMD
• NVidia

Hardware malfunction/overheating

In certain situations the graphics card can get temporarily detached from the game, if it overheats. Usually for non-overclocked GPUs this should not happen. If the graphics card (or some other hardware) is malfunctioning this can however also happen without an overclocked system. This is especially likely the cause, if your system is in general unstable and you regularly run into bluescreens and crashes/issues with other applications/games as well.
To rule this possibility out, you can try to reduce the graphics settings in game to see if the issue is prevented with lower graphic settings (which should reduce the load onto your system and might prevent the problem from occurring). If this solves the issue, we strongly suggest you determine the actual cause of the problem, since your system is likely to become more and more unstable over time and might eventually stop working altogether.

Installing driver updates

You should not try to update the driver while the game is running. If you just did that and therefore ran into this issue, be aware that this is expected behavior. In that case the graphics device is temporarily detached from applications/games and therefore X4 will terminate.

Detaching external graphics cards / deactivating graphics cards

If you have an external graphics card and detach it while running the game or use other means to deactivate the graphics card, you will trigger this situation. Again, simply don't do that while the game is running.

Interfering 3rd-party tools / malware / viruses

Certain 3rd-party tools can trigger the GPU to reset as certain malware and viruses do. Try to terminate any 3rd-party program you suspect to interfere with the GPU and see if this prevents the termination of the game. If you are aware of a 3rd-party tool which triggers this issue, we'd like to get that one to know to update our list of known 3rd-party tools. Simply leave a comment here or send a mail to prioritysupport@egosoft.com with the subject: "X4-275 - Exitcode 1028" and state the suspecting tool.
Also verify that your system is not infected by malware or a virus. If you don't have a virus scanner installed (and/or rely on the Windows built in defender) at least temporarily scan your system with one of the free antivirus systems available on the net. Also do the same to scan for potential malware. There are multiple free malware detection tools available on the web.

Requesting further support

If you ended up on this page and ruled out all of the potential causes above, please send a mail to prioritysupport@egosoft.com (Subject: X4-275 - lost device) with a screenshot of the popup error you got and your dxdiag as well as the vulkaninfo attached. This wiki entry explains how to create this information.

Technical background

The technical explanation for ending up in this case (i.e. Exitcode 222-231 or 1028) is that a so called lost device event occurred. This happens, if the graphics card is (mostly only temporarily) detached from the application/game. Usually this surfaces in that all screens go blank for a few seconds (i.e. the graphics card is resetting).
As explained above, there are multiple triggers for that. Most common are hardware malfunctions or driver issues which trigger the reset of the device. However, it can also be caused by bugs in the game's graphic engine when it issues incorrect/unsupported calls to the graphics card. In such a case the graphics card will reset itself.

Issue history

Before X4 2.50 the different causes triggering a lost device condition were all combined in a single exitcode (Exitcode 222).
Starting with X4 2.50 we investigated potential solutions to automatically deal with the lost device condition rather than resulting in the game to crash. In preparation to future improvements on that side different exitcodes were introduced (223-231) which reflect whether a later automated solution might be suitable and if not, why that solution would fail.
In X4 3.20 we further improved the handling of another category of lost device issues. Before X4 3.20 affected players ended up on the general graphics engine issues troubleshooting page (X4-2) or weren't redirected to the correct troubleshooting page at all (f.e. when running the game in fullscreen).
As of X4 3.20 Beta 3 affected players are now redirected to this page here which provides more specific directions on how to resolve the issue.
In X4 3.30 Beta 4 we added handling to reduce the cases running into this crash slightly.
In X4 4.00 Beta 1 we added handling for cases related to the GPU running out of memory. This should reduce the cases running into this crash slightly more.
In X4 4.00 Beta 5 we fixed a (rare) condition which could lead to the lost device issue.