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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

Really? I knew I liked 7 for a reason.

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