Graphics driver crashes don't result in BSODs anymore. Microsoft fixed that in... Windows 7? Vista? They just trigger a black flash of the screen for a few seconds and then everything is back up as it was - including active GPU contexts. You can have the driver crash & recover in the middle of playing a game and barely even notice, it's incredibly impressive tech.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

About a year ago, the aging Nvidia 980 in my aging gaming desktop decided to suddenly die in the middle of playing Valheim. Windows helpfully switched it over to the on-board graphics. It was smooth. Almost a little too smooth because I didn't notice the screen black out, but I did notice I was suddenly at 1024x768. I was terribly confused for a few minutes before I realized what happened.

That's pretty damned impressive.

I thought the app itself had to support losing the display and safely/sanely recovering from that?

No. The driver model changed in Windows Vista. After that video driver crashes can't take down your system. As of Windows 8 DWM (the compositor) is always on so everyone gets those benefits too.

Unless you have an amd card I guess. Multiple games reliably took down my 5700xt and the system along with it on certain driver versions. While other versions would crash when using obs. Good god what a terrible card that was initially.

Really? I knew I liked 7 for a reason.

The worst part about now in hindsight is how they probably could've moved to a work-list system like Vulkan or io_uring and kept it all in separate processes to retain that stability.

Yes, memory wasn't as plentiful back then and with single-core machines there still would've been more unavoidable context switches but with queues the context switches could've still been reduced in total as opposed to crossing the kernel boundary at all.