Layout Rendering Slow on Mac?

I’ve not been doing much modelling recently, but this latest version seems incredibly slow

Anything changed, or do I need to update my Mac?

23

What version of SketchUp/LayOut?

It’s 2018

Hi Mark I found 2018 Layout a smidge faster. Still dog slow but a smidge faster.
LO does need single core grunt and decent graphics to move at at any speed with relatively complex drawings.
Over Xmas I just had to move from a late 13" 2013 retina MBP (2.8Ghz i7, integrated graphics) to a Hackintosh i7 8700k 3.7Ghz with a 1080Ti card largely to gain an acceptable speed in Layout. It is significantly better, not what I would call sprightly but acceptable. SU has been fine on the MacBook thoughout, it is always responsive and ‘feels’ fast. Whereas Layout always ‘feels’ slow, I believe LO is single threaded so multi-core isn’t really applicable but there are other discussions on this forum on this topic that the LauOut team are participating in, which is good news.
Software moves on, features are added, we require it to do more over time, handle larger files.The hardware resources it has to run on has to move lockstep with it to some degree, I had certainly got to the point with my 13" MBP that I had pushed it as far as it could go doing the job I needed it to do (in regards SU & LO), hence the upgrade. I think a nearly 5 year old day-in day-out professional life-cycle for that hardware is amazing value for money.

What version were you using before LayOut 2018? If you upgraded from LayOut 2017, I would not expect the performance to have changed at all. If you upgraded from LayOut 2016, there were some changes to the underlying graphics engine.

We have had some reports of issues with LayOut on the newest update of High Sierra (10.13.2) but nothing I’ve been able to pin down yet. Most of those issues consist of LayOut not running at all. Did anything else change on your system recently - os version, antivirus, etc?

To be safe, try reinstalling SketchUp & LayOut.

-m

Agree it’s good value for money.

I imagine how much I would pay each working day not to be on a PC.

Multiply that by 5 years…

I think the issue is with the models I’m working on.

Someone else has created them and included components (hip bonnets) that look great, but have lots of complex curves that take a lot to render in vector/hybrid mode

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::+1:

Good Evening

If possible I would like to ask a quick related question to this.

I’ve created a model for a client, and in Layout, the zooming and panning is really slow. However, I know why in this case, as the model contains a few items which are very detailed, (Steel Patterned Mesh sheet, which is unfortunately key to the design), and I always use Hybrid rendering in Layout. Hence, in this case it is taking a lot longer to render these viewports.

For the record, I never have problems on the models without this level of detail. Unfortunately, I can’t share the Layout file as it’s confidential.

Anyway, my question is this:

I always leave rendering in Layout set to Auto. I had a brainwave and thought, in this case, I’ll just turn Auto off, as I don’t need to keep re-rendering the viewports. It sped up a little, but not significantly. I thought that the rendering setting, between Auto and Manual would have a greater impact. Is this not the case?

Kind regards

Mike

That setting only determines if LayOut will automatically re-render the viewports if changes are made to the SketchUp file. It has nothing to do with rendering the viewports as you zoom and pan. While you are working you could either leave the viewports rendered in Raster or you could set them to be displayed at low or medium quality.

Yeah, I did find that if I left the two offending ( :wink: ) viewports in Raster while I worked, it was much much better.

Mike

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If I remember correctly, the setting is in Preferences, for the display?

Document Setup>Paper.

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That’s the one. Thank you.

A particular Coffee shop likes their steel perforated mesh too much :wink:

:smiley: Funny. Maybe you need to convince them it’s passé.

I would definitely use a texture instead of modelling the mesh.

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In hindsight, a good idea.

It causes no problems for Sketchup, it’s just Layout.

I’ll have to create a PNG of the pattern so I can see through the holes.

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