Regards an alternative to Vue; I meant something designed for doing plants and trees and stuff, a dedicated generator of sorts.  There's something like that out there but I just cannot remember the name of it!

Regards Blender Cycles and the card you ordered; Cycles does indeed work with an nVidia card because I use it myself, but as DustRider pointed out, it's just not as efficient on an nVidia card as a CUDA-based renderer.  It does work though, so it may be just a matter of waiting for nVidia to implement better OpenCL drivers.

PS, Glad to hear you've decided to check out Blender.