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.