I never meant to imply it was the only reason, just that it was one of them. Another is the support considerations; each option you add to the drivers to tweak rendering output is yet another permutation of testing.
In addition, some of the options better fit the old fixed pipeline architecture of the early 2000s; forcing some of the rendering options older drivers used to have isn't really possible in a fully programmable world.
But to expound a bit on the cheating angle, one manufacturer (Asus) even went so far as to specifically market these features as a competitive advantage for customers of their products:
With that said, users that installed the debug versions of the windows DirectX framework (historically) and the various developer tools (such as nVidia insight) have some of the same capabilities that used to be built-in to older drivers.
Developers have combated this by using programs like punkbuster or rolling their own tools (Blizzard wrote "Warden").
In addition, some of the options better fit the old fixed pipeline architecture of the early 2000s; forcing some of the rendering options older drivers used to have isn't really possible in a fully programmable world.
But to expound a bit on the cheating angle, one manufacturer (Asus) even went so far as to specifically market these features as a competitive advantage for customers of their products:
With that said, users that installed the debug versions of the windows DirectX framework (historically) and the various developer tools (such as nVidia insight) have some of the same capabilities that used to be built-in to older drivers.Developers have combated this by using programs like punkbuster or rolling their own tools (Blizzard wrote "Warden").