Initially after PE split those Unix side crashes got caught as a part of generic handling. The assert (which implies process abort) was added intentionally because we so far we were assuming that Unix side Vulkan driver access violations (or other sort of aborts) are something to be caught. As while in principle the game might continue we so far don't want it to work in this state which is already deeply broken. We had a lot of complains from GPU driver devs when we accidentally caught all those exceptions and games were continuing but exhibiting deeper issues or graphical glitches. Of course there might be a case in theory that something crashes in the userspace side of Vulkan driver on Windows, that get caught but game and then everything works fine. Maybe if we had an example when something like that is needed for compatibility, but AFAIK we don't. And even then such a thing won't necessarily work well; crashing driver on Linux might be leaving broken state which it doesn't on Win dows. So I'd suggest to continue treating native driver crashes as fatal, at least until we need that otherwise for something specific. -- https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11164#note_143273