New Autodesk Graphcis Hardware Site

Autodesk have created a new Graphics Hardware site: http://www.autodesk.com/graphics-hardware. Here you can select multiple products and find the common driver and hardware configurations that will work best for your system.

Along with merging different products onto the same website, they have added a few new elements to the graphics hardware search.

Firstly, you now have the ability to select up to three products or one of the new Design Suites. On top of these options you can also refine the search by selecting a year of the product (i.e. 2012) and/or Design Suite edition (Standard, Premium or Ultimate).

Secondly, you need to select the operating system you are using. This will refine the search to only show you hardware and drivers that have been tested for the given OS (current options are Window7, Vista, XP (32 or 64bit), MAC OSX 10.5 and 10.6.

The third section is to filter by graphics card information. This is the last mandatory field in the search form called the Card Vendor field (current options are AMD, INTEL, Matrox, Nvidia, Parallels, and VMware). To improve your ability to determine what to purchase, an optional field for the card type has been added, which helps you to find cards based on vendor classification. For example, if you are looking for a new laptop and want to know what graphics card to get with it, you can use the Mobile classification. The other two classifications are Workstation and Consumer and the definitions are as follows:

• Workstation - graphics hardware designated by the manufacturer as workstation-grade, typically meaning it is designed to work with 3D CAD applications.
• Consumer - graphics hardware designated by the manufacturer for desktop or gaming level use, typically meaning it is not designed or recommended for use with 3D CAD applications.
• Mobile - integrated hardware normally found in laptops, but also can be found in some desktops.

The next optional field is the Card Model, this field allows you to pick your specific graphics card.

The final new mandatory selection on the form is the Show me option. Here you will see three choices: All Cards, Certified and Recommended. The reason for adding the new recommended option is to suggest hardware for future purchases that meets the recommended requirements for a given product or Design Suite. Below is a brief description of these options:

• All Cards:
  
  • Hardware acceleration is enabled by default if the installed driver passed all Autodesk tests.
• Certified:
  
  • Meets Autodesk’s minimum system requirements and has passed all Autodesk certification tests.
  • Hardware acceleration is enabled by default if the installed driver passed all Autodesk certification tests.
• Recommended:
  
  • Meets Autodesk’s recommended system requirements and has passed all Autodesk certification tests.
  • Hardware acceleration is enabled by default.

Now that you know how to find what you are looking for from a graphics card perspective, you can then look at which drivers have been tested and passed.

For example, if you select AutoCAD and Inventor you can scroll down into the results and select your current card (i.e.an Nvidia Quadro FX 1800). Here you can see that both products were tested on the 197.03 driver which can be downloaded from the button on the right that says Download Driver. But before doing that we would suggest that you uninstall the current driver completely so that you are using the Window VGA driver. This will ensure a clean install of your new driver, and avoid any conflicts.