The problem there is largely game writers doing stupid/non-standard things. The driver writers then special-case the game in their drivers to patch the wrong behaviour. That's why many driver releases from nVidia have only one changelog entry, "optimised for <popular AAA game here>", and coincide with the launch of the game.
This is wrong on so many levels. It makes it really hard to compete with nVidia/AMD when you need to hire hundreds of driver writers to patch every game under the sun if you want to have reasonable performance.
Sadly MS may well have been the very entity that institutionalized this behavior.
For example, they included an exception in their memory protection code for SimCity. This because said game held a "use after release" memory bug that had gone undetected. And rather than have the game crash on later MS product releases, MS put in said piece of code.
This is wrong on so many levels. It makes it really hard to compete with nVidia/AMD when you need to hire hundreds of driver writers to patch every game under the sun if you want to have reasonable performance.