I’m super excited that sketchup is now working on iPad. This is going to change my entire design process when on the go. I’ve truly been waiting for something like this since I bought my first iPad in 2010.
My question is hardware related.
Because of this software release I’m thinking of upgrading my trusty 2018 12.9 iPad Pro - it’s that groundbreaking for me. How does SketchUp run on a new 1tb M1 iPad Pro? Would this be a substantial performance upgrade or just a moderate performance boost? I design displays, commercial environments and retail stores for a living so I work with small, simple models all the way to visualizing complex environments. Thanks for any insight in advance!
M1 offers a significant performance improvement over other iPad chipsets. Highly recommend if you’re planning to really get after it using SketchUp for iPad.
Depending on what ll you think you’ll need to store on your iPad, 1TB of storage might be overkill…
Full transparency when it comes to performance on iPad (even the M1 flavor) vs desktop… there’s still a difference – mostly related to SketchUp running out of memory (and crashing) when files cross a complexity threshold and get into the range of containing millions of polygons.
That said, for simple > moderately complex models I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the speed and performance that M1 iPads offer.
My little 128 GB, 6G iPad says it’s not sufficient to import the USDz file created by SU into Procreate. To be clear, SU for iPad exported it OK I guess, but it’s Procreate that’s saying I need a new iPad. Perhaps @JQL is more up on that.
I can attest to my 130mb project model crashing SU for iPad before too long. What’s not clear is whether buying a new iPad model will matter.
My M1 iPad is the first one I bought. I can’t compare with any other. Mine is the 256Gb version and I think it has 8Gb memory. I believe the 512Gb has 16GB ram as well as the 1Tb.
I crashed mine with a single SketchUp model because of huge textures. Polygons don’t crash it, so if I remove all textures, all models I have work with it.
My desktop has 32Gb RAM and a 12Gb VRAM GPU and it also struggles a bit with the same models.
I haven’t been able to open a USDz model created from SketchUp in procreate, though I don’t think it was memory related. Imho it has to do with textures not being correctly unwrapped.
This was with latest beta version, but I haven’t tried with that again. I will.
Thanks for the responses everyone! I’m going to keep hammering away using my 2018 iPad Pro until I start running into major performance struggles. Have a good day!