Single Core modelling

Hello Sketchup Pros. I’m trying to sort out the bottle neck of performance. Sketchup uses single-core modelling method. But any chance that this concept would be changed? Having in hands opportunity to work on virtual machine making to look for programs which can use multi-core performance for creating solids. As far as I know that’s AutoCad, Blender, 3dsMax. But major target is to push Sketchup. Or is it same issue like with Minecraft, who built app for single-core, ended adjusting it dual, but still process itself is very bulky. I’m just curious if fundamental changes will be taken or SketchUp will continue rely only on one CPU parameter for 3d modelling.

All the programs you mentioned except for minecraft, and every other cad or 3D modeling software uses just one core, I don´t know the technical reasons why it’s impossible to make a multithreaded cad or 3D software, probably some software engineer or programmer could explain us why. I know you can make that some features of a 3D software use multiple threads, like sketchup uses for saving files, but for modeling or drawing you will use just one core. Autodesk promised almost 20 years ago when the firsts dual core and quad core chips were released, that they were developing Autocad to be able to take advantage of multiple cores but here we are almost in 2026 and AutoCad and all the products from Autodesk, like Revit, Maya, 3DS Max among others, use just one core for drawing and modeling.

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Thank you for explanation. That’s actually very outdated technology for today. I guess something should be changed. Otherwise it become impossible for users to get each new released programm new computer hardware, as resources demands are only growing and desktop development cannot catch up new demands. Computers become very expensive.

that’s a billion (trillion?) dollars idea. 3ds max has been working on it since the 90s.

a few years back, Rhino explained that while some tools and the interface can be shared to more than one core, it’s not really worth it. you need to cut the operation in parts, send them to each core, gather the results, reassemble, recut for the next operation, rinse, repeat.
it’s faster and safer on one core.

apps that can go multicore are apps that can safely share the operations. a render can, it’ll delegate part of the picture to render to each core and the GPU. modern games can for the same reason, so many ressources used, they can dispatch and then reunify.

Minecraft or Starcraft are running on engines from a time where having a dual or a quad core was quite elitist, updating that to modern gear would mean rebuilding an engine for the ground up.

Some of the other software you mention use multiple cores on some tools or tasks : it could be the UI. or 3d visualisation while you work on 2d.
In sketchup stuff like AI diffusion could in theory be multi core. but that’s very niche for a low gain.

let’s face it, CAD is a single core industrie.

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Don’t you think they would have if possible??
Untill today no-one has been able to divide the 3D workload over multiple cores effectively..

What bottleneck are you seeing? Can you post some examples of your models and what the issues are?

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I’ll just reference this forum post again - CPUs and Multithreading

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