In the recommended hardware section of Learning Femap, I recommend the use of workstation graphics cards such as the AMD Firepro or Nvidia Quadro lines. You may have also seen recommendations such as these:
I can no longer recommend using certain AMD Firepro cards with Femap. There is a unresolved issue with either the Firepro chips, drivers, or their interaction with Femap which is causing a driver crash. The Femap window will suddenly go blank and following that it will fail to respond to any input. The open file cannot be saved, thus costing progress. Here’s the windows error message:
This issue has affected almost every AMD Firepro tested. This includes the FirePro V4900 and FirePro W4100. In light of this news, I recommend looking to Nvidia or a different AMD card.
Update 9/14/17
On the Siemens Femap Forum website, a user questioned his own decision to purchase a FirePro product based on my experience listed above. He received an answer from the developer of graphics for Femap at Siemens. While the listed solution (TDR) for the cause of the error did not prove to work in my situation, I can say that my experience with FirePro’s is limited to the two versions listed above and with my own hardware (i.e. motherboard). If I can clarify my previous guidance, I’d like to specify that only those two cards experienced issues. Your mileage may vary!