Hi everyone! In one of the many, many threads here about one of the many, many varieties of Direct X errors NFS Rivals incurs, I found someone posted a nondescript link to a fix they had found for their own problem, applied it to mine, and it worked.

The moral is digging through forums is worth it, because mods don't find everything to put into stickies.

On that note, mods, please put this into stickies, and it may be worth bumping threads about this issue with the fix (or at least messaging the poor soul to check on them and their product for which they paid you).

So, onto the good stuff:

Issue

After 20-40 minutes of play, Need For Speed Rivals hangs and/or crashes with error message:

"DirectX function "GetDeviceRemovedReason" failed with DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG ("The application's device failed due to badly formed commands sent by the application. This is an design-time issue that should be investigated and fixed. "). GPU:"<Your active GPU here>", Driver: <Driver version>

Specific fix

Add "-RenderDevice.Dx11Enable 0" without quotation marks to the launch parameters of your game, which can be done from the Origin client in the settings for the game.

General fixes

Keep your operating system updated. Update your GPU driver. Install DirectX from the redistributible in the installation folder of Origin, more instructions in NFS Rivals frequent problems section.

Notes

This fix has sustained a few more hours of play. The error didn't crop up for the first 4 hours of play or so, but did on the next day. I then applied the fix and played unburdened for another few hours. I will update this thread if the fix should falter. Win10 x64 i5 3570K GTX 660 16GB RAM.

Initial source: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Need-for-Speed-Rivals/NFS-Rivals-directX-error/m-p/4988293/highlight/true#M12445

Fix link: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/685736/?comment=4500412

Fix video: https://youtu.be/c0ywz7Lldf8