But that's unrelated to how tightly coupled the app is with the OS, but rather how ungracefully the driver fails. No matter how "far away" the app is from the g

But that's unrelated to how tightly coupled the app is with the OS, but rather how ungracefully the driver fails. No matter how "far away" the app is from the gpu, at some point in the pipeline whatever data is being received will have to interact with it in some way, via the driver. Sure, you could patch the app to avoid sending what's known as bad data to the next layer but I'd argue that that's the wrong place to do it.