Raytracing always crashes my games - don't know if it's a bad card (old 2080) or what, but usually turning off Raytracing is the fix. How can I do that with BG3?

No Rt in BG3

There is no raytracing in this game, and DLSS is disabled by default. Have you tried using the NVIDIA GeForce Experience app? That should let you change the settings for installed games.

Well drat. Back to the drawing board. Early Access worked fine, now it crashes on load.

I get the device disconnected error in both DX11 and Vulkan

I'll assume you've done all the normal stuff like driver checks and whatnot.

Crashing with RT kinda screams "crashing on load" to me. Do you have enough power going to the GPU? 2080 was a heavy card at the time and needed a lot of power. Does each power plugin have a seperate cable to the power supply?

Also try and turn off RAM overcloks (or lower them). That can absolutely cause crashes if they're not stable under load.

Great suggestions, but not it. Reset bios and made sure no overclocking was turned on, and my PSU is an 850 which should be plenty for a one-card system (2080).

Cyberpunk started doing the same thing about two major updates ago, feezes and locks as soon as I go outside a building.

There is likely a common thread - bad RAM module or something. CPU and GPU are both running nice and cool, so it's not temp related.

Error I am getting is DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED

Googled and tried all the solutions I could find - Reg key edit, uninstall and reinstall drivers; memory module test; turn off all Anialiasing and DLSS; disable any overclocking; update windows; reinstall game.

All going nowhere :(

i7-5820k 3.3ghz; 32GB Ram; RTX 2080; Win10 64 Bit

I saw someone on Reddit complaining about 2080 performance in the game. It might be a driver issue. Nvidia are notorious for letting older cards go to shit in drivers.

Sounds like a windows, driver, or graphics card issue.
You could try:
* Running "sfc /scannow" from an elevated command prompt. Unlikely to help, but quick to try.
* Download DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) uninstall the graphics drivers, reboot into safe mode (Hold shift while choosing restart to get the option) and running DDU to remove all traces. Then reboot into normal mode and reinstall the display driver.
* Reinstall Direct X 11.

Failing all that, try a fresh windows install.
Failing that, see if you can borrow a graphics card from a friend and see if swapping the hardware out helps.