If you’ve been around SketchUp since V5 (thanks for that!) you have doubtless seen significant improvement to SketchUp’s ability to render models with more polygons at faster frame rates. And you have likely seen me answer questions about why SketchUp can’t render/more faster on a number of different occasions. I would hate for you to think we don’t recognize how important (to simply everybody) SketchUp’s core rendering/modeling performance is. Clearly, we do.
It turns out performance is pretty tough to quantify. I would have to go back and look at the historical test runs, but I would be surprised to find that we haven’t improved performance at least marginally since 2016.
We’ve known for years that we are locked in an ‘arms race’ with out user community. We make SketchUp handle more/faster, which allows our users to make bigger models until they get big enough that SketchUp’s performance is pegged again. We respond by making SketchUp handle more/faster again, at which point our users are again free to make bigger models until… they reach a point where SketchUp is pegged again. Most users simply don’t think about performance at all until it starts to suck, and then there’s nothing easy that can be done to improve things short of managing down your model complexity.
As a team, we are committed to continuing to improve raw performance with every release. I just ask in response that you recognize that performance is not infinite and there will always be a point at which your model is ‘too big to run’ on whatever the current state of the art system happens to be.