Yeah, no user application should cause a blue screen of death or kernel panic under normal circumstances, unless it is either a bug or they're messing with something from the kernel (but in this last case, you generally need to run the program with high privilege anyway).
This is a distant ideal with today's GPU drivers. Browsers go to heroic lengths to rewrite graphics API calls and recompile potentially hostile code originating from WebGL to avoid tipping over crashy GPU drivers.
What normally happens with native GPU intensive apps is that devs change their code to work around driver and OS crashes, and if the app becomes popular, GPU vendors will react to frequent crashes from that app with driver fixes.
