Ongoing Performance and Rendering Issues in SketchUp Layout – When Will This Improve?

SketchUp Pro
1

I’ve been using SketchUp and Layout for over 10 years, and I am increasingly frustrated with the ongoing performance issues, particularly with processing speeds and rendering in Layout. This problem seems to be getting worse, not better.

Our typical model sizes are around 60MB, but we make every effort to keep them lean to avoid Layout bottlenecks. Despite this, Layout struggles significantly when working in Hybrid or Vector rendering modes. These modes are essential for our workflow, as Raster output is simply not viable for professional-quality documentation. Given the performance of other software like Revit and Microstation, which handle vector processing and rendering with ease, it’s baffling that SketchUp Layout continues to lag behind in this area.

This is not a new issue—SketchUp users have been reporting sluggish performance, unresponsive viewports, and painfully slow rendering times in Layout for years. There have been numerous discussions on this in the forums, yet the problem persists.

SketchUp markets itself as an efficient and intuitive design tool, but Layout’s rendering engine is seriously holding it back. It seems that SketchUp has not made significant improvements to Layout’s performance in years, while competitors continue to refine and enhance their capabilities. If SketchUp wants to remain competitive with Revit, Microstation, and other industry-standard software, Layout needs a complete overhaul—one that prioritises speed, stability, and proper vector processing.

Has anyone found practical workarounds to mitigate these issues? Are there any planned improvements on the roadmap from the SketchUp team? We need real solutions, not just incremental updates that fail to address the core performance problems.

Would love to hear from both users and SketchUp representatives on this.

2

Now Layout has an option for working on raster then when you export, all the rasterized windows will automatically be converted to vectorial or hybrid, depending on your settings, we´ve been promised a performance increase for future sketchup versions, sadly no one knows when will it be able and sketchup team members who know, won’t tell us because of the privacy of the company they should have agreed when they were hired.

3

Can you share a LO file to see if anyone might be able to diagnose what’s happening? I too wish for a serious overhaul of the core of LO, and I would wish for this above any other updates to SKP / LO - but in the meantime I don’t find it to be unworkable.

I’m sure you know this, but generally:

Large textures
Overly detailed components from 3d Warehouse and manufacturer websites
Inserting large PDF / JPG images into the LO files

Are you using the new or old graphics engine in LO?
Have you experimented with how ‘draft mode’ can help?
Are you using the rendering override on Export?
Are you breaking the drawing (Sonder Style) into smaller, logical LO files?

I work with 60-100mb files, some larger, and while LO slows down when it needs to update / re-render my scenes it is generally much faster and easier to work with than previous versions.