[Nick Seidl]

Thanks all for the help so far. A few of you asked about my budget. I would say I want to spend no more than $200, with $175 probably being my preferred max if it all possible. A few other potentially helpful details: I'm also pairing this with 4Gb of DDR3 1600, a 3.0GHz Athlon II X2, and the motherboard has both PCIe x1 and PCIe 2.0 x16 slots.

To make sure I'm understanding everything correctly:
-a mid-grade to high-end desktop card should be sufficient
-256-512Mb of GDDR2 or GDDR3 is a decent memory setup
-using the Autodesk approved (not necessarily the most recent) drivers goes a long way.

As far as the Autodesk certified graphics cards and drivers, does the certification mean that they are ideal for use with Inventor, or just that they are guaranteed to work with Inventor?