There is not a person alive that has at least the slightest experience with computers that hasn't heard of Nvidia. Of course, a not so experienced person might say that Nvidia produces that stuff that makes new games run on the PC. That's close, but no dice.

Nvidia is a world leading graphics card manufacturer and it's mostly renowned for that. When making your very own computer configuration, you don't actually think about Nvidia until you get to the graphics processor. But they do more than just that. They also have things like chipsets and media player software.

Due to the launch of the long awaited Duke Nukem game, Nvidia chose to show their support for it by using the Duke's image on their website, when presenting the new GTX 560 video card. Computer games have progressed so much in graphics technology that most serious gamers need to buy themselves a new card every day to keep up with the times. I'm just kidding, although graphics technology nowadays does change really fast. The 560 tries to make the most out of today's possibilities by trying to appeal to gamers with various features, like employing the CUDA technology. This CUDA is their parallel programming architecture and it uses the resources of the GPU to help the central processing unit in different computations. Its benefits don't just stop at gaming; it also gets the job done in processing videos and images or simulating fluid dynamics. Another interesting piece of technology used by this model of video card is the Nvidia 3D Vision, which combines the GPU, specific software, glasses and specific displays to give you a 3D experience similar to the one at the movies.

The 3D Vision can also be used in two scenarios: for home use and for professionals. Home use refers to the games you play at home, or the movies you watch on your PC. Professional use is designed mostly for people who work with CAD or 3D video editing tools. As you may or may not already know, some modern Nvidia video cards can take full advantage of the SLI technology, on SLI compatible motherboards, of course. This actually allows you to combine multiple graphics cards to increase performance, kind of like ATi's Crossfire. You might think that SLI can combine only two graphics card, but that couldn't be more wrong. You can combine 3 GPUs and give them different roles, like use one card for rendering game graphics and reserve another for all PhysX calculations, thus speeding up games.

You should never buy a video card just according to what it says about it on their website. Feel free to check out forums where a specific card is mentioned so you can learn from the past experience of others. Don't be ashamed to ask any question there either. You just don't want to spend a lot of money on something that goes bad after 6 months.