I have tried resetting to Blender defaults deleting all extra addons and themes but Blender still randomly blinks out. I am not rendering, and actually I am not even interacting with Blender. I only have Blender and a browser open when it blacks out *no error message)
Before the crash my graphics card is listed as a Cylcles Render device. On restart of blender it is no longer there.

also I've noticed that after the program crash, on restart of Blender, it has not retained my changes to the Preferences. Auto Save preferences is definitely ON. but th epreferences are reverted back to where they were after my last successful quit without crash.

Make sure that you are starting Blender with your Nvdia card and not your integrated one (I mean the program itself, not the device used by Cycles for rendering), there are still crashes and glitches problems with Intel cards, especially with outdated drivers.

Auto-save of preferences happens at exit time, not as you change the settings. You can disable Auto Save in the hamburger menu in the Preferences Editor, and that will give you a manual Save Preferences button that will perform the save immediately.

Kind of sounds like your Nvidia card is crashing and not recovering. Definitely try updating drivers for the Nvidia and/or Intel integrated graphics.

Ok. I am not sure how to do that. Don’t suppose you could point me to some instruction on this?
I’d like to point out that after the crash my GPU is not detectable by my whole computer system... it like there is no GPU in the computer until I restart. It’s that serious.

Previous betas didn’t do this btw. I think the crash appeared as of the last two betas (I’ve been updating once a week)

In T66912#721382, @Gavin Scott (Zoot) wrote:

Auto-save of preferences happens at exit time

Thank you for clarifying that.

Kind of sounds like your Nvidia card is crashing and not recovering. Definitely try updating drivers for the Nvidia and/or Intel integrated graphics.

All my drivers are up to date. And that’s for sure. The real wildcard here is the Windows 10 update 1903. Now that I think of it, Blender didn’t have this problem before the system update. Just something maybe you all can keep an eye out for if someone else has a problem.

I'll play around more with the RC on my 1903 system here. Is there any type of operation that seems to trigger the problem, or is it random?

Ultimately your GPU crashing like that is not going to be Blender's fault (it's the driver and OS's job to make such things impossible for either buggy or malicious software) so it's almost certainly a driver/OS issue.

In Edit->Preferences, in the lower left corner there's an icon with three horizontal bars. If you click that you get options to check off Auto-Save as well as "Save Current State" which may be helpful. When auto-save is off then a "Save Preferences" button will appear allowing you to do it manually when desired.

Sorry, I was out most of the day. As mentioned above, there is no task which triggers Blenders's crash. In fact Blender was in the background a few of the times it crashed. Other times I may have been in the middle of a Viewport render (Eevee) and just general modeling. Nothing triggering it that I can find.

The more I think about it, it must be the Windows update. Or maybe it's just this laptop? I have acess to more computers tomorrow, I'll test it on those with and without upgrades and see if it happens there or not.

I have been using 2.8 betas on this laptop for months (!) without any major problems. it did start after the 1903 update but this co-incided with the Blender final beta and RC. anyway, Ill let you know tomorrow.

I was not able to repeat the crash on another machine running update 1903. I guess it’s just my unlucky laptop. For a moment I thought it might be caused by turning off the preference for auto-perspective... but I think I’m just imagining thing now.

I would still check which graphic card is running Blender's interface, just to exclude this to be another Intel Hd problem.
@Auriea Harvey (womanonfire) look at the file exported from here, at the OpenGL section:

OKAY above are the System Info logs before and after a crash. I am not sure where to look for which graphics card is running the interface.

Still having the same crash (while doing nothing, application in the background, no other apps open) with RC2. ANd you're saying this is because of the Intel chip in my computer??? It's annoying because I have been testing betas all along development and the crash is only recently happening!

It might be worth checking in the Nvidia Control Panel that it's not using the integrated graphics as default. Currently your CPU is listed as Platform #0 in the system info. According to online article that I've found (can't verify this because my PC doesn't have integrated graphics) the following should work to change the default (temporarily). In the top bar under Desktop should be an entry Add "Run with graphics processor" to Context Menu. Once enabled you should be able to right-click on the Blender .exe or shortcut and have a context menu entry Run with graphics processor that lets you select the Nvidia graphics card instead of integrated graphics.

This sounds like a known issue that caused Microsoft to block 1903 on Surface Book devices with discrete Nvidia graphics:

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/210447/microsoft-pulls-windows-10-version-1903-for-surface-book-2-models-following-gpu-failure-on-some
https://betanews.com/2019/07/14/surface-book-2-window-10-1903-block/

@Gavin Scott (Zoot) You're very likely correct on this one. Pretty bad bug. @Auriea Harvey (womanonfire) you can ignore my suggestion, since it won't work if the OS disconnects the GPU.

Okay, thank you so much for that article! I will wait for a fix from Microsoft. Sorry I blamed Blender.... OF COURSE it's Microsoft.