This is my first forum post in a while so please excuse any forum etiquette errors I make! I was just wondering if there is a limit to how quickly sketchup (64 bit) can run. I regularly work on large very detailed models with hi res textures and my files are often around 500MB, so needless to say, I don’t experience the snappiest performance! I have 16GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GTX680 graphics card an i7-3770 CPU and wondered if there is any point upgrading any of it to achieve better performance?
Short answer: no.
SketchUp relies heavily on your CPU but it is a single-threaded application that doesn’t benefit from multiple processor cores.
Creating multithreaded 3D modelling applications has been discussed since the first dual processor Pentium machines arrived nearly twenty years ago. I was laughed at by a couple of high-end graphics workstation vendors when I expressed an optimistic view that developers might crack this nut in the not so far away future.
To improve performance, identify the bottleneck, whether CPU, memory quantity, Disk IO and improve that if you can.
if your CPU runs at 100%, you already have a pretty fast one, not much to do I’m afraid.
If you run out of memory and see your system swaping memory pages to disk, consider more memory or a faster disk (SSD and motherboard with SATA 3, or SSD through PCIe) use performance monitors to check.
Coding an app to use multiple cores at once is very difficult when the work to do isn’t heaps of identical calculations to do on similar data like pixels, polygons, vectors and simple geometry, which graphics cards (GPUs) have been designed to do very efficiently with hundreds of cores. Sketchup already uses that technology for the display part of the app, like when you use the orbit tool. But when editing the geometry it’s hard to optimise.
Thanks for the info! It seems rather fruitless to upgrade at the moment as my specs are reasonable, though I will use a monitor to see if more RAM will help!