Old Technology = Poor Perfomance

I am really disappointed in the Sketchup product team. They have fallen way behind the technology curve. Virtually all modern computers come with multiple CPU cores, multi-threading, oodles of ram and GPU’s on the video card that surpass many whole computers but Sketchup doesn’t keep up with any of the new technologies. Once your model becomes a certain size and you have cleaned it up and compacted as much as possible it no longer matters what you do the program will simply use one core on one processor, not very much ram, and only one GPU on the video card. My CPU has 6 cores (12 with hyperthreading), 64 GB ram and the newest Pascal architecture NVIDIA 1070 video card and a M.2 PCIE based 500gb solid state hard drive and it still takes about the same amount of time to save a model or add animation as it does on my old AMD single core 15 year old computer with a 10gb hdd and 2 gb of sdram. When are you guys going to get off your collective butts and put out a better product that takes advantage of the new hardware?

Really, and who are you !!!

Show me what you can do.

What have you programmed lately?

All 3D modelling programs (including even 3DS Max and AutoCAD) use only a single core for the core modelling process, which is the reason customers are usually advised to get a notebook whose CPU is clocked higher.

Back in May last year, I managed to pull out a 22.000 square meter diploma project with my frail i3-and-no-graphic-card notebook. Theoretically more powerful computers will handle SketchUp better but it’s not only their job, meaning the the user must implement SketchUp-related modelling skills and techniques.

Improving Performance

SketchUp Hardware and Software Requirements

I take the same model, and render it in autocad in 10 seconds, but it takes 45 to 50 minutes in sketchup. It is a very large space station model and very detailed. I have already done everything recommended to improve performance in a model. So something is different in the autocad program if it isn’t using all the cores. When I look at performance in device manager in sketchup (and this is with a 4.2ghz processor) only one of the 12 cores presented has anything going on, and it is not even running at 25% of capacity. In Autocad all 12 cores are active doing something, it may not be drawing related, but they are doing something. And the video card gets cooking hard enough to make the fan speed up. None of those things happen with Sketchup on the same computer and the same drawing. But god I hate autocads complexity.

Dan

I am Dan, the technician who works on computers all day long and who is by far the worst coder ever created. I code for a half hour and wake up 4 hours later. But just because I don’t have the skills to build a new automobile doesn’t mean I don’t know a good one when I see it. The same goes for quality new programming and dated commode worthy programming.

Dan

What do you mean by “render”? Usually the term means outputting 2D (photorealistic) images. SketchUp doesn’t have an integrated renderer like AutoCad does, so the speed is controlled entirely by what you use. Most modern rendering engines, in contrast to 3D modelling, are multithreaded so it is quite natural that the AutoCad renderer uses all your cores. In SketchUp you must use a plugin to render, and what happens is due entirely to which plugin you have chosen. The simplest apparently work within SketchUp’s limitations while the more advanced ones pass the work to a process running separately.

Anssi

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