Layout drawing performance optimisation

Hi. I use Layout as a part of my architectural drawing workflow. I model in Sketchup and produce drawings in Layout. As part of my workflow I make detail scaled drawings overlayed over model viewport sections. My problem is that Layout and the drawing process gets very slow and laggy, screen response becomes very slow and it’s a generally very frustrating experience. I have “Groups” turned to “darker” in Document Settings. I have tried tracing over raster rendered viewports but this doesn’t change performance in the scaled groups in which I am drawing.

I would welcome any general performance tips people might have. In particular I would also like advice on where the performance bottleneck is; I am planning to buy a new Mac and need to know whether to focus on single processor speed, multi-core speed, RAM or graphics card performance. Currently I am using a 2015 MacBook Pro, 2.7GHZ Dual core i5, 16GB RAM, Intel Iris 6100 integrated graphics. I display on a pair of 4k Dell monitors.

Any advice welcome!

What version of SketchUp/LayOut are you using? Please complete your profile.

single thread performance is key (for modeling ops), a dedicated GPU with decent performance important for a balanced system too.

Profile updated; thanks for the prompt. I am running the most recent update 20.0.362

SketchUp3d-de: I was aware of the need for good single processor performance for sketchup modelling. Is this the same for Layout scale drawing?

Thanks.

Yes. As is a dedicated GPU.

From reading your initial post and knowing you are using SketchUp/LayOut 2020, my first thoughts for optimization include making sure your SketchUp models are impeccably clean and efficient(purge unused stuff and that sort of thing) and that maybe you don’t need to do so much Scaled Drawing in LO. Instead, leverage stacked viewports and the ability to control tag visibility inside of LayOut. I think you would see better performance but you’d also have less work to do when you need to make changes to the SketchUp model and then the document.