Duke Nukem Forever is actually going to ship despite the absence of an apocalypse, and Nvidia wants to make sure you'll be able to play the long awaited follow-up on gaming notebooks. That's where Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 560M graphics chip comes in, one of two mobile GPUs Nvidia unwrapped at the Computex convention in Taiwan. As the more powerful of the two, Nvidia says "the GeForce GTX 560M and Nvidia Optimus mean gamers get 50 frames per second in Duke Nukem Forever and five hours of battery life in Microsoft Office," which translates into "real power and real portability."

According to the latest figures, Nvidia still dominates the discrete desktop GPU market and managed to grab a 59.4 percent share in the first quarter of 2011. That's a good clip higher than AMD, which served 40.6 percent of the discrete desktop GPU market in Q1, and had it not been for AMD's performance in notebook graphics, Nvidia would be sitting way out in front.

AMD today quietly launched a trio of new graphics cards specifically intended for OEM builders, including an entry-level card that you could save up for with nothing more than a paper route. It's the Radeon HD 6450, a budget card priced at about $55 and built around AMD's lower-end Caicos chip with 160 stream processors, a 64-bit memory interface, and support for both GDDR5 and DDR3 memory.

As much as we like dual-GPU videcoards with more pixel pushing power than most games know what to do with, it's not always fun and games in the graphics card market. There's professional work too, and it's the reason why Nvidia's Quadro line exists. The newest entry to Nvidia's professional graphics line is the Quadro 2000D, which was designed specifically for the medical field.