As an Inventor user, I would caution against getting an ATI card. ATI has a reputation for not being friendly with Inventor -- within Inventor circles, they've come to be known as "Always Trash Inventor". I really have no idea as to why ATI cards have a tendancy to behave this way, but from my own experience using a radeon 8500, I did have problems running Inventor correctly, which forced me to change my Inventor hardware settings to conservative (yuck
) to get things to work correctly.