If by full presentation in ddraw you mean swapping instead of drawing to frontbuffer it seems to me it is not quite trivial at least, if possible. Such a present (by blitting to primary surface) often updates only the part of the surface (vs ddraw Flip which swaps the backbuffer). It is possible that primary surface doesn't have backbuffer at all, also such an added swap should care about preserving untouched parts of frontbuffer. I. e., it looks to me there are good reasons why it is done this way in ddraw / wined3d now.