Systems and GPUs feels like it should be a “solved problem,” but, really, it isn’t.
If you get a D3D / Driver error that blacks the screen like that, that is always, 100% of the time, a bug in the driver/kernel, or a problem with the system itself, not a bug in the game/engine/application.
Surprisingly, although we all like to blame those lazy BIOS / kernel / driver developers, a fair amount of the time, the problem is actually that the power supply is too weak, or the signal quality in the motherboard is marginal, or some component on the board is poorly soldered, or some hardware problem like that. For the longest time, I kept having occasional D3D driver resets on my graphics card, and I tried a large number of drivers and even upgraded the power supply, and nothing helped.
However, moving the graphics card down one slot (luckily, I have several 16x slots) seemed to work – I haven’t seen the problem in several days!
How is a normal human being supposed to debug these problems? The answer is, they can’t. Welcome to our high-tech future.