I’m an architectural designer specializing in large-scale residential and commercial buildings using SketchUp. My projects are quite demanding, often exceeding 1.5GB per file. A recurring issue I face is lag, especially when applying 4K textures or working on complex designs. SketchUp becomes sluggish, with response times exceeding 30 seconds every few minutes, making my workflow challenging.
Processor: 11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900K @ 3.50GHz RAM: 64 GB GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti (8GB VRAM)
My Goal
I’m looking to upgrade my hardware to achieve smoother, lag-free performance in SketchUp, even with high-resolution textures and complex models. I’ve done some research on potential upgrades and would appreciate your expert insights on whether these changes will make a meaningful difference—or if there are other, more cost-effective solutions to explore.
Potential Hardware Upgrades
Processor: Considering an upgrade to either an Intel i7-12700K, a dual Intel Xeon E-2488, or an Intel Xeon Gold 6138.
GPU: Upgrading from the RTX 3060 Ti (8GB) to either an RTX 3080 Ti (12GB) or an RTX 3090 (24GB).
RAM: Currently 64GB, which I believe is sufficient.
Request for Expert Feedback
I would love your recommendations on:
Whether these hardware upgrades are likely to significantly reduce lag in SketchUp.
Any alternative suggestions to optimize my setup without excessive costs.
I suspect that no hardware change will produce a significant improvement in performance, lagging will continue. You need to change your modeling habits. Why are your models so monstrously big? The video you showed was not that complex, it’s only a single house, and the video was not made on SketchUp anyway. Why are you using enormous texture files in SketchUp? There is no benefit. You need, I suspect, to pay attention to poly count for your entourage, and use appropriately sized textures for the job.
A 100mb SketchUp file is a very large one, capable of modeling skyscrapers if modeled with care and attention. 1,5 GB is a mistake and no hardware will run it. Sorry to be blunt, I hope to save you some money and frustration in trying to buy your way out of this problem. Your current setup is fine.
Your profile says you are using the “Free Plan” of SketchUp. That implies you are using the web based version. How are you creating 1.5 GB models with that version? Or are you using a cracked version of SketchUp for desktop?
I agree with @endlessfix no matter what version you are using, 1.5 GB SketchUp models indicate you are not managing your models correctly. No hardware is going to compensate for that.
I am using free plan for my personal use but for my professional work, I use licensed version of Sketchup at office. How would you suggest I can get smaller file size, without compromising the video quality, as for most clients texture quality is main priority and I have to use 4K textures for all material.
Yes, you are absolutely right, whenever I download large models from Sketchup Warehouse, even those models multiple times bigger than mine have size much smaller than mine. Actually, I need to get best quality textures for that purpose I often use 4K quality textures and also use 70% textures from Enscape Material Library. What resolution would you recommend me to use texturing for my models, to get model with small size and without compromising output texture quality in the video?
Large textures only bloat the file. SketchUp resizes all textures larger than 1024 pixels to 1024 pixels. Checking the “Use maximum texture size” box in Preferences doubles or quadruples that but there is still a limit.
Regarding texture size, 4k might be justified for when the single tile of the pattern is viewed across the entire 4k screen. This might happen with a large stone slab on the wall, but usually this is not the case. Using the free SU Material Resizer Plugin can help quickly reduce the images that do not require such high resolution. I usually use 512 or smaller for patterns that never get close to the camera or are small and repetitive, 1024 for items that need a little more detail, and may allow 2 or 3 as needed to push 4k if they are an exceptionally large materials that the camera gets close to and that need to show more detail.
You should make a copy of your file and experiment with the reductions until you get the level of detail needed with the lowest amount of pixel data possible.
The other way to reduce file size is to examine your components and modeling techniques for polygon count.
You can use plugins or use MeshLab to reduce the number of faces on components.
Again, get it to the level of detail needed for each object depending on how close you intend to move the camera to those objects.