I am curious if anyone in the community is using the new M2 chip version- I have been waiting to upgrade my Intel based Mac and am trying to decide if having the Max version will give me any appreciable improvement in performance over the Pro version.
I use Sketchup Pro to create museum exhibits- the museum file is about 2GB and has lots of graphics mapped onto surfaces, so on my Intel MacBook Pro the file slows to a crawl.
I have been told that is due to the Intel version running sketchup on only one core, whereas the M series chips run SU on multiple cores. Do more cores mean faster performance in Sketchup?
no. faster cores are more important than amount, because 3d softwares like sketchup are mono-cores
M1 series are about 3,2 Ghz, M2 are about 3,5 Ghz, so yes, there will be a jumb from your intel chip
Besides that, RAM. RAM is good, especially with huge / heavy files
HOWEVER
if you buy a mac right now, it’ll be shipped with Ventura pre-installed. Know that in some cases, users have had issues using SU22 on Ventura. Crashes, instability (and pre2021 SU will be even worse)
We don’t have a release date for SU23 yet, but know that your new computer might have trouble for the first few days / weeks, don’t resell your old one yet.
edit : M1 cores are 3,2 not 2,3. slight difference. slight.
SketchUp, like all other interactive 3D modeling apps, uses only a single core no matter how many your computer has. An M2 will almost surely be faster than your old Intel Mac, but until 2023 is released, SketchUp is not supported on macOS Ventura. It works for some but there have been a lot of issues reported here on the forum.
All: Thanks for all this robust guidance. So if I am hearing you right, even in SU 2023, the program will still be running only on a single core. Hence paying for the fastest processor is worth it, but paying for extra GPU cores isn’t.
What is the worst case scenario for the release of SU Pro for 2023? March? May? i.e. are past years updates any guide to this year’s?
For some time it was novembre (2015-18), recently, it has been a bit of a yo-yo. Latest has been version 19, mid feb.
The lack of regularity or info, even vague, is a bit frustrating at times.
M2 will definitely bump single-core performance (Su uses only single-core). https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks It will also make your user experience of using Mac far more pleasant due to load-up times etc. I’ve had no issues using SU22 on my M1 Mac Mini (16gb ram) with Ventura. For rendering, I use Chaos Cloud with Vray so don’t necessarily need the additional GPU. M2 should be a similar performance to M2pro single-core.
Hi there,
In May I purchased a Mac Mini M2 Pro, 10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 32gb memory to replace a 9-year-old iMac. I use SketchUp daily (current version) with Ventura 13.5.2 (current version). In 4 months, SU has crashed once. For me, it’s been very stable. Even more so than older versions on my older iMac.
I opted for more than just the entry level M2 Mac Mini, as I run other things like Illustrator and Photoshop and wanted more oomph. Regardless of where you settle on number of cores, the M2 vs. the Intel Macs is night and day. Just load times alone happen in a blink compared to the Intel.
And as always, spend as much as you can afford, buy more than you think you need at the time. You won’t regret it.
