Graphics Card Certification Longevity

I am considering two AMD graphics cards: WX 3200 and WX 5100. The 5100 has considerably more power than the 3200. The 3200 was released only 18 months ago, as opposed to the four year mark of the 5100. Both are on SolidWorks' certified hardware support and get regular driver updates. But how long can I plan on SolidWorks supporting the WX 5100? The EAA Student Edition license is only good for one year at a time, so will next year's edition still support the 5100? I'd rather not buy hardware with that short an expected lifespan. Data, anyone?

Thanks,
Alan

Just as a data point, I'm running Solidworks on a 4-5 year old Microsoft Surface tablet with built-in "Intel HD Graphics." I occasionally see a warning message from Solidworks that it's not supported, but the program runs fine. So, even if Solidworks stops active development for a graphics chipset, the program isn't going to refuse to run. At worst you'll see a message every few hours.

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Originally Posted by Eric Page

Just as a data point, I'm running Solidworks on a 4-5 year old Microsoft Surface tablet with built-in "Intel HD Graphics." I occasionally see a warning message from Solidworks that it's not supported, but the program runs fine. So, even if Solidworks stops active development for a graphics chipset, the program isn't going to refuse to run. At worst you'll see a message every few hours.

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My Frankenstein machine runs what I'll call the "basic functions" of SolidWorks with my current NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 gaming card (not on the certified hardware list), but won't touch the higher order rendering tools. That's why I still hunting.

Alan

I'm running an old Dell T7600 workstation but the graphics card has been upgraded. No matter what I do SWx complains about the card (which is supported by SWx but not tested on this machine). Because I run a couple of different version of SWx and setting the "no graphics notifications" for one version resets it to on for the other versions. Anyway, as much as it complains SWx still runs fine with my hardware.

It's also an operating system issue. My long-in-the-tooth DELL machine ran SW under Windows 7, and when I upgraded the OS to Windows 10 I discovered that it (Windows 10 and NVIDIA) didn't have an appropriate graphics card driver, and I couldn't run SW at all. Had to go back to Windows 7.