[Chris_Ely]

Originally Posted by yash101

That's a gaming card. It's not meant to paint excessive resolution images to the screeen. Those chips are meant to paint regular HD images to the screen really quickly.

The performance shouldn't be horrible, though. You probably have an i5 or an i7 (or maybe an AMD alternative)! The integrated graphics should be capable of running the program pretty well!

The GPU chips are actually the same in many cases and based on the same architecture, just optimized for different tasks. What makes workstation cards (Quadros) and gaming cards (GeForce) different is the drivers, build quality, and validation. The drivers of gaming cards are optimized for maximum frames per second (FPS), while workstation cards are optimized for image quality. Workstation cards also follow the reference design from the GPU manufacturer, ie. every card is the same. Workstation cards also undergo validation for hundreds of professional applications, which is why they cost more. The first 3.5 minutes of this video explains the difference well.
But you can still run Inventor on a gaming card. I run Inventor on my laptop which has a GeForce GTX 650m, a Core i7 @ 2.3GHz - 3.2GHz (Turbo), and 16GB of RAM. Inventor runs perfectly fine.

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I'm not talking about rendering performance, I'm talking about performance while actually working in the application. It's slow and unwieldy at all times, and has always been this way on every machine I've ever run it on.

The main factor in in-application performance is going to be the CPU clock speed. Autodesk recommends at least 3.0GHz. The RAM amount will affect the size and amount of parts that can be open and worked on at a time. The hard drive speed will affect how fast parts load and save. GPU and CPU cores will affect rendering times.