Hello, I´ve been using SketchUp for a while now, so i just heard about the “Hardware acceleration” bc my main problem is the “processes” while modeling mainly because the size of the models and polygons i use, so where can i find this “hardware acceleration” option, it doesnt appear on the (Window-Preferences-Grafics) so what could be the problem, i do have the most recent drivers for my graphics card.
Until SketchUp 2016 it was possible to use the program with software only, no need to have hardware acceleration, using a GPU. Since SketchUp 2017 that hasn’t been an option, the program won’t start up with there being a GPU involved. You will be shown a message saying that there is no hardware acceleration.
So, it’s normal not to see options for hardware acceleration in 2017 and later. Here’s how it looked in 2016:
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Thanks for the reply, so how can i make SketchUp to use more Hardware?, bc while im working it only uses like 10% of 64bg of ram, and another 14% of the cpu but 0% of gpu. So how can i make it to reach like up to 70%?
that’s some good stats you have here. sketchup appears to be purring. good.
how to make it use more RAM ? why would it use more RAM ? well, you could make it a black hole by downloading tons of stuff from the warehouse, a 1Tb file will definitively use more RAM. but that’s a bad idea.
how to make it use more CPU ? again, what for ? Sketchup, like the other CAD / 3d software, is mono thread. it will use one core, up to 100% of its capacity.
When you say, 14%, is it 14% of one core, or 14% of the total ?
Once more, making a black hole of a file would definitively push it to 100% of a core, but once more, that’s not something anyone should wish for.
As of the GPU, sketchup is not GPU heavy. Your profile says you’re using 2023, so openGL as an engine. THe GPU will give a hand for the interface, for visual things like shadows and light but… sketchup is not a live rendered video game or a video editor tool. you won’t make the GPU usage spike, and if you do, again, it’s not a good sign!
Why exactly do you want to push RAM / GPU / CPU usage to 70% ?
If sketchup is slow for you right now, there are 3 path to explore (probably more) :
- make lighter models. I can see at least two copies of a complex building, plus terrain, lots of terrain, and I’m only seeing a small part of your file. a 10M lines file will handle better than a 15M but worse than 1M.
- turn off things like profiles. they require SU to compute stuff all the time, an that computing time is not available for other tasks.
-sketchup 2024. it’ll use directX12 or Metal instead of openGL, it’s smoother, faster. tripled my fps on my Mac, doubled on my PC
it’s like saying “my car will do 2500rpm when I’m doing 130 on the highway, how can I make it go 6000rpm?”
you don’t. that’s a bad idea.
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Lol, yeah I get it, neither do I want my PC to explode. But the thing with rising hardware usage is because with some “processes,” like with the simple tool of “intersecting faces,” the whole program freezes for like 30 minutes.
And I did a new SketchUp folder with the minimum of what I need.
Also, later today, I need to use the “Curviloft” plugin for something I need to do. So the main question is how can I reduce the process times? Is there something I can do with the app, or do I need better hardware?
weight doesn’t matter. I can make you a file with a single cube of 30mb. but it’s just a single cube.
you should check the statistics panel, it will tell you how may lines and faces are in your model.
imagine each face is a sentence in a book. if you have 1 million faces, it’s 1 million sentences, it’s a very long book and therefore it’s gonna be heavy and hard to manipulate. and there isn’t much you can do about that.
Sketchup is a mono thread app, meaning that whenever you ask any task, it’ll all go to one core. if you select 40k faces and ask for intersection, it’ll have to check the intersections of each and every of the 40k faces, even the ones not touching. and it’ll do all that on a single core. so yeah, it’ll take time.
it is impossible to tell you what to improve exactly from a couple of screenshot, you’ll have to share a file for that.
but among the usual trics, one is to have several files.
a file for the project, maybe another one just for the details and furnitures (say a couple level). a file for the surrounding. and then one where you’ll import them all and synchronise if needed.
that way you’ll model in the smaller files and assemble them all at the end.
but again, without sharing a file you’d like to go faster, hard to say.
and again, su24 is faster.
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It’s more like saying “my car can drive at 500 MPH but for some reason we’re only going 75 and I want to go faster.” He obviously and clearly wants to use more resources to make it faster. It’s very logical chain of thought he posed.
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the reason why your car won’t go 500 mice per hourglass (or some similar weird unit) is because the engine wasn’t designed for it.
same with SU.
I’m not stupid, I understand the primary question. and the answer is no, not much you can optimise and overclock in your computer because you’re hitting the limitations of openGL.
The reason why RAM would be maxed is if they were working on several super heavy files. a normal file won’t use more than a few Gb.
The whole CPU can’t be maxed because of single core thing. a single core can be maxed when doing a resource-needy action. and from what they describe it already do. They can’t use more than 1 CPU because that ho CAD / 3d soft works. trust me, the day they finally find a way, the industry will change.
the whole GPU can’t be maxed by SU alone because it’s not a rendering tool trying to live render.
can their machine work better with their complex file ? yes, it might require some optimisation of the design method.
can their machine and their SU23 use more power / capacity from their machine ? not really, the bottleneck is the engine, and SU23 is stuck with openGL.
hence my (several times mentioned) advice to try SU24.
But beyond that, if SU is using all these ressources and nothing more, it’s because it considering it to be enough. and no matter how big and powerful the machine is, if SU needs 10 min to check every possible intersections one at a time, it will have to take 10 min.
and that goes full circle to me asking to see a file. well not me per say, I’m on a break, I won’t spend an hour checking a file, but others (you?) might
You don’t need to explain how it works. Total waste of time. I’m just trying to help YOU understand why he would expect software to use more horsepower. It seemed like you completely missed his point and then just explained that he was unreasonable to expect more usage. It’s not unreasonable. But I personally do not need the lengthy lecture. At all.
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so you misunderstood my intent. gotcha. 
I didn’t miss their point. It is unreasonable to expect your machine to work at 70% when it does the job at 14%. it’s actually a cause to worry in the case of sketchup.
This is not lengthy. at all. by far.
It’s not unreasonable to expect software to use more resources to do things faster. Sorry, it isn’t. And sketchup isn’t very optimized in general when compared to other modelers. I did not misunderstand your lengthy lecture kn how software works though. You were more than clear.
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I know that @ateliernab has been responding, but it seems like you aren’t aligning minds, so let me give it a try.
SketchUp will use as much RAM as it needs to hold its database of the model geometry, textures, etc. There would be no benefit to grabbing more RAM. That would be like using a 200 liter tank to hold 5 liters of water! There is no way you can force SketchUp to take more than it needs and there would be no benefit if it did.
As has been pointed out already, SketchUp is the same as all other interactive 3D editors in that nobody has ever managed to make an editor use more than one CPU core. The editing process is inherently sequential. There is no way to spread it across multiple cores. This is not an aspect of your model, it is basic to how 3D modeling works. There is nothing you can do to force SketchUp to use more cores. Most of the time, SketchUp is easily able to stay ahead of what you can do by way of editing. If you launch a very heavy operation, SketchUp will saturate the one CPU core and at that point there is no way to make it go faster.
The main way that GPU affects performance is that it can take time to transfer the desired model contents from the main memory to the GPU memory when you orbit, pan, or zoom such that what has to be rendered changes. Then there may be a lag while the GPU catches up with painting a very complex model, but for most models a decent GPU easily stays ahead. That said, I don’t know why yours would say 0%. It is certainly doing something, even if it is a light load. You can mitigate both of these by avoiding massively heavy (millions of edges and faces) models.
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Thank you very much, really appreciate the information.
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Are you sure that SketchUp is using your discrete Nvidia GPU and not the CPU-integrated graphics ?
Check the Details from the Graphics panel of the Preferences dialog.
I think the graph might be misleading. when you look at it, sketchup is idle. therefore, nothing to compute, you get 2%
if you were to manipulate your model wile looking at the numbers, you would see some various results.
I just tried, with a 3050 rtx. idle, 0-2%
I simply used the orbit tool in my model, and saw some 17-21% spikes. stopped, 0-2%
if you only have one screen, it’s normal. either you work in SU and your GPU gets busy, or you look at the GPU activity graph therefore everything else is calm.
edit : same with CPU. you get 4% while idle. unless you have a 25 core CPU, in which case that could mean one core is working full load 
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I’m an architect, not a tech computer wiz. But all I know is that I used to have problems with SU taking its time on operations, until I learned about video card benchmarks from a post I was reading. I replaced my GPU with one that had a good balance of price to performance, and wow! what a difference that made! https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/
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