I am probably only scratching the surface, but it works for me and whilst I would desperately like to learn more and be more proficient, I simply can not afford the time.

I'm a contractor and so use whatever desktop computer I am given at the companies I work for.

Some better than others, but all of the companies I have worked for in recent years have had a real lack of capacity in the Graphics Card area. Typically the IT people supply the hardware and they have little knowledge about CAD systems. In general they don't want to know as it's a foreign entity to them. They don't understand it and “it's all too hard” , so typically the Engineers get what everyone else is getting with maybe a bit more memory and a bigger monitor. The monitor size looks impressive but the real need is for grunt in the system and for a well matched system as 3D is very resource hungry and the systems just slow down or crash.

As CAD moves more and more into the 3D world there is an ongoing and increasing gap in knowledge about just how the software interacts with the hardware. I found that the local Autocad resellers to be a good source of knowledge, certainly regarding the recommended set up and specifications. The problem then is to get the company to recognise that what works for the clerical people for word processing and spread sheets is not going to be good enough for the Engineering CAD applications.

I have drifted off the point a little, where I really wanted to go with his was to comment on the gamers driving the technology for graphics and how the engineering CAD systems are able to piggyback off them to get a good result for their applications. But of key importance is that companies support the Engineering effort by investing in suitable hardware to run the software and get the real value out of the systems.