This is still a problem for shaders in GPU applications. If a shader has an infinite loop (or a very long calculation), should the driver (after some time limit) stop it, kill the fragment, or just let it run? For games and other commercial stuff, the former is probably what you want, but for scientific/GPU computing, the latter is what you want. Worse, some versions of windows assume that since the graphics driver has been unresponsive for some time, it kills it, which artificially limits the computing power when doing computation on the GPU.
There's no API for a application to control how the driver should behave or set the timeout or something, and there's certainly no way for the driver to tell if your shader is going to finish or not.
I don't know if this situation has improved recently, but I'd like to know.
