Despite similarities, setups can be quite different. Each generation of GPUs tend to also have a slightly different architecture, so there is often quite a difference in how things are executed despite the observable side effects staying the same. Plus things like overclock can skew things as well. Not to mention how much load you put your system under and what kind of add-ons are used etc. My believe is that a lot of device losses are down to timing issues where it matters in what order things happen and if there is enough time for caches to get flushed/invalidated to observe what happened. So just holding X-Plane slightly different can have a huge impact by skewing timing results. One other thing I didn’t really mention is that the GPU can also timeout. Command buffers get 2 seconds to execute, otherwise the operating system will reset the GPU because a locked up GPU won’t put new images on screen and no one wants to hard reboot their system just to interact with it. The older folk here probably recognize a lot of these issues as something that used to happen semi frequently back in the day and the industry has been trying really hard to rid the world of the sins of this past. 2 seconds is a really long time in a world where, for a long time, the gold standard for frame time was 16ms and since then has only gone down, but because shaders are just arbitrary code executing, it’s possible that when held just right, loops never terminate or something else locks up the GPU.

Why do you think there are some folks that NEVER have a VDLE (my last one was several years ago), while others get them regularly?
We all use pretty much the same hardware (3 different manufacturers of GPUs) and run the same GPU drivers and same software (X-Plane) on them.
It seems that some folks get these crashes regularly, others never. Where is the difference?