Hi @Beamer2
The short ‘answer’ to your question is no. And yes but its not a panacea.
The long version of opinion is this. Without a doubt that machine will significantly improve sketchup performance particularly if you have large scenes with lots of textures, the GPU will make a difference.
I went from a 2013 13" MBP with integrated graphics to a Hackintosh with a 1080Ti and 11Gb VRAM. That was transformative. Thing is, in situations were SU was CPU bound, such as Skalp rearview projections and general SU snappiness I didn’t really notice much (significant SU) difference between my 2.4Ghz dual core i7 in the 2013 MBP and the 3.7Ghz Hexacore i7 in the new machine (obvs bound to a single core). There was a difference obviously but not workflow transformative.
But I had built the Hackintosh to do other heavy CPU and GPU workloads dealing with things that either fed out of or feed into SU, so SU was only one element of the overall package and really not at all part of the reason for the build (apart from a GPU benefit (as I wanted to use large textures for Vray).
Getting onto Layout, my beef is Layout performance too and always has been (along with many, many people), see here from back in the day. Layout 2018 - not up to par with other drafting software?
I’ve stayed on version 2019 (2019.3.252) as this seems the best version I’ve used, the Mac transparency issue was finally fixed after 2 years, SU styles are displayed correctly again etc. I’ve got 2020 installed but don’t use it and I can see lots of problems reported on the forums about it so I’m staying clear for now.
Did I see an improvement in Layout with the Hackintosh and associated £1000 GPU, of course, was it significant, no.
Knowing what LayOut’s performance profile is, I wasn’t expecting it to I guess, its certainly better but then 2019.3.252 version had a hand in that too.
So in part, that is why I’m moving back to a MBP, I can accept the base clock frequency ‘sacrifice’ going from 3.7Ghz down to 2.8Ghz because I honestly don’t believe it will make ‘that’ much difference to SU / Layout, there is a processor generation difference so I’ll maybe be getting a better IPC on the new MPB but I actually get a couple of extra cores and a higher boost clock too, so for my other workloads the multi-core score is roughly the same.
The new 5600M GPU for the MBP announced this week’s an absolute beast and even bests the Vega56 in the top of the line iMac Pro in some circumstances but Ill be adding an eGPU anyway so have an upgrade path there.
My whole workflow is and always has been on a Mac and I have no plans to switch. Thats a decision I’ve made and maybe you have too (even though people will say you can do X,Y and Z on a PC for cheaper and TBH you probably can).
If you have other workloads that will benefit from all those cores and that GPU then that absolutely has to be the main thrust of the value proposition when looking at a machine like the iMac Pro (I’d get one myself but I want some portability and I have a different screen setup requirements, space etc).
If you are basing the purchase around SU/ Layout performance, I honestly don’t think the software will touch the sides of the capability if that machine (Maybe on single core utilisation) and that machine will have a long productive lifetime (I used my MBP for 6 years as my primary workstation), it wont be a Layout silver bullet but it will be (a bit) better.
Hope this helps, this is just my opinion based on my experience.
PS - It’ll be interesting to see what happens today - its WWDC and rumours of an all new iMac abound!