duzcizgi :
The most important role MS played is, they've standardized the environment.
A that was the single-most important thing they did. With all the bumps and turns the way gave to them. And loads of money as well.
Now it is time for WINE. And for Nvidia to return to their origins. Read carefully and understand the last sentence.
Quoting Wikipedia:
A fresh start
Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang realized at this point that after two failed products, something had to change for the company to survive. He hired David Kirk, Ph.D. as Chief Scientist from software-developer Crystal Dynamics, a company renowned for the visual quality of its titles. David Kirk turned Nvidia around by combining the company's experience in 3D hardware with an intimate understanding of practical implementations of rendering.
As part of the corporate transformation, NVIDIA abandoned proprietary interfaces, sought to fully support DirectX, and dropped multimedia-functionality in order to reduce manufacturing-costs. Nvidia also adopted the goal of an internal 6-month product-cycle. The future failure of any one product would not threaten the survival of the company, since a next-generation replacement part would always come available.
However, since the Sega NV2 contract remained secret, and since NVIDIA had laid off employees, it appeared to many industry-observers that Nvidia had ceased active research-and-development. So when Nvidia first announced the RIVA 128 in 1997, the specifications were hard to believe: performance superior to market leader 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, and a full hardware triangle setup engine. The RIVA 128 shipped in volume, and the combination of its low cost and high performance made it a popular choice for OEMs.
Ascendency: RIVA TNT
Having finally developed and shipped in volume the market-leading integrated graphics chipset, NVIDIA set itself the goal of doubling the number of pixel pipelines in its chip, in order to realize a substantial performance-gain. The TwiN Texel (RIVA TNT) engine which NVIDIA subsequently developed could either apply two textures to a single pixel, or process two pixels per clock-cycle. The former case allowed for improved visual quality, the latter for doubling the maximum fill-rate.
New features included a 24-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil support, anisotropic filtering, and per-pixel MIP mapping. In certain respects (such as transistor-count) the TNT had begun to rival Intel's Pentium processors for complexity. However, while the TNT offered an astonishing range of quality integrated features, it failed to displace the market leader, 3dfx's Voodoo 2, because the actual clock-speed ended up at only 90 MHz, about 35% less than expected.
NVIDIA responded with a refresh part: a die-shrink for the TNT architecture from 350 nm to 250 nm. A stock TNT2 now ran at 125 MHz, an Ultra at 150 MHz. Though the Voodoo 3 beat NVIDIA to the market, 3dfx's offering proved disappointing: it was not much faster and lacked features that were becoming standard, such as 32-bit color and textures of resolution greater than 256 x 256 pixels.
The RIVA TNT2 marked a major turning-point for NVIDIA. They had finally delivered a product competitive with the fastest on the market, with a superior feature-set, strong 2D functionality, all integrated onto a single die with strong yields, that ramped to impressive clock-speeds. NVIDIA's six month cycle refresh took the competition by surprise, giving it the initiative in rolling out new products.
G80 G92 are here for too long now. GTX200 might not be "down-scalable" to complexity and costs. DX10.1 is here for sometime now.
Games ussually take a 2 Year cycle to develop. Assassins Creed already came DX10.1 Enabled. i believe Age of Conan should have been too (as advertised), but they pulled it in the last minute.
Honestly ? If Nvidia don't move fast enough, will have the same problems as Windows Vista Capable/Premium Ready.
In fact, the R7 can work as multiGPU (not CF, but working as symmetric multiple processor) single framebuffer. THIS is the revolutionary part in fact. Watch out for 4870x2. They may include some Havok and terrific graphics together with some bundled demos. 
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