Until recently, I had SketchUp 2017 working fine on an old ThinkPad T400 (Win7). I’m currently using my brother’s old T510 (Win10) with Intel HD Graphics (integrated, I believe) and after I installed SU17 I was notified that I only had support for OpenGL 2.1, so SU wouldn’t even open.
Now I’m trying to find a new laptop (preferably ThinkPad), but all the ThinkPads I’ve looked at had Integrated Intel UHD Graphics and someone at Lenovo told me that might not support the OpenGL 3 and Hardware Acceleration that SU17 requires. Does anyone know whether SU17 would work on these laptops?
My models are not terribly complex. I use it mostly to design woodworking projects for my private use. My main worry is that any new computer I get will be rejected by SU the way my current one is. Is there any way to make sure that won’t happen before actually buying the computer?
I once was interested in a rather specific computer and I wasn’t sure of its graphic abilities so I ran a test before buying it. I found a shop that stocked them and asked the staff if I could run some tests on a demo model. I had a sketchup installer on a thumb drive with a couple of models of varied complexity. I installed Sketchup and opened the various files to see how they behaved. this gave me enough info to know that graphic card and processor could cope well with moderate models but struggled with very complex ones. So it was ok for what I wanted.
Box has a good suggestion. Trying one of your models on SketchUp on the computer before you buy would be good. Or you could select a different computer that has dedicated graphics card. Historically Nvidia graphics cards and their drivers have been the most reliable at supporting OpenGL which is the rendering interface SketchUp requires from the GPU.