Recently, the biggest graphics card that you'll ever see came out to the market: the ATI Radeon 6990. This thing is bigger than a sheet of regular paper, making it slightly difficult to fit into standard cases. Additionally, the heat generated by the card makes it hard to cool the case and prevent the processor from overheating. ATI's main competitor is nVidia, another graphics card company. We have yet to receive the 590 that the company promised, but it will most likely be smaller than the 6990, and have better performance. (Because nVidia is just better than ATI.)
The 6990 card has 4GB of onboard memory, whereas standard cards nowadays have 1.5 Gigabytes at most. This sort of shows people how overboard ATI went just to attempt to dominate nVidia in the gaming graphics market. To hit the full spec sheet, you can visit AMD's page about the card.
A lot of new games have or are coming out that utilize the graphic power of these recent cards. Crysis 2 will without a doubt be setting a high performance benchmark for upcoming cards as well as the 6990. Battlefield 3 will also probably test the merit of many cards, demanding large physics calculations for accurate widescale environment destruction.
If you're thinking of buying a 6990, don't. The previous models of this generation are plenty, such as the 6870 from ATI, or the 560ti from nVidia. These cards can handle modern games fine, and even if you can't run your games at maximum settings, the graphical differences shouldn't even make a difference when in game.
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