Think of the current situation like this. And get ready for one of our rather useless analogy's again. You can't run a car without gas, now can you? OK you can if you own a hybrid car (give yourself a new Greenpeace sticker for your trouble you trendy person) or happened to live in Rio De Janeiro in the mid-70 after the OPEC Oil crisis, where the Brazilian Beetle Bugs were modified to run on um... a blend of sugar and alcohol (why waste that stuff in a car?).

The point being that without a vital ingredient to power their next GPU (NV20), DirectX 8, NVIDIA can't release NV20. What's the point of playing Quake III: Arena a “whopping” 5fps faster. And we're not making excuses for them, they do a good job of that themselves, and NVIDIA isn't the only one in this boat.

All the 3D chip companies are sitting up shite creek without a paddle so to speak until Elvis comes back alive and Microsoft releases DX8. And if this isn't the real reason that NVIDIA, 3dfx, ATI (Bitboys Oy are just naughty boys and don't count) and anyone else I've neglected to mention has for missing the next product cycle, I'll eat a stale chalupa.