Sketchup 2017 Checkup Utility

Does anyone know or use this utility? By default it installs in Program Files\Sketchup\Sketchup 20xx\SystemCheckup.exe. I don’t remember where I downloaded it. I was not able to find it at Extension Warehouse. It is a standalone System Checker that is supposed to evaluate your computer’s system heath and suitability. It checks for System info and some Sketchup settings such as System Ram, Operating System, Graphics Card OpenGL requirements, Hardware Acceleration and Graphics card (GPU) memory. It correctly identified my Graphics card When I had an AMD Radon Gaming card installed and reported that I had less than 1mb of memory. Last week I installed an Nvidia Quadro M2000. It is a 4 gb 128-bit card with 768 CUDA Cores. That is not terrifically fast but it is dedicated GPU memory that far exceeds Sketchup’s recommended (but not required) 256 mb of dedicated GPU Memory. I get the same Error: "Your Quadro M2000/PCIe Graphics card has 1 MB of graphics card Memory. Nope, I have the latest drivers installed so that is not a reason. My Vray 3.6.03 plug-in recognized my GPU and is able to use its memory. There is obviously a bug in this program.

If it is from Team SketchUp, they should know about its incorrect reporting. My copy of Sketchup Pro is 2017 and out of warrantee so it is not possible to contact Trimble. I don’t really need this program. I KNOW what is in my computer. Anyone else using this program may not however and should be aware that this program, IMHO is not a reliable system checking utility.

You can get CheckUp here: https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000318

That erroneous report of GPU memory is caused by a bug in Windows. CheckUp just exposes it.

Maybe they could remove the memory reporting feature from CheckUp but they can’t do anything about the cause.

DaveR,

Thanks for the download info. I probably downloaded it from there. If in fact this is a “known” MS bug, the tool can hardly be consider to be a reliable tool regardless of why it reports Error in blaring red letters while incorrectly reporting GPU memory. I consider this a relatively important system hardware category.

Sorry, I don’t think this program should be recommended for use. It also says refer to Help documents but there is NO link to help documents in the program. Am I missing something here?

DaveR,

I was able to access and read SketchUp Checkup | SketchUp Help. I guess that is where the so called “help” file is located. Under Results and what they mean: "Error: Your “[name of video card]” graphics card has MB of graphics card memory. SketchUp requires a graphics card that has 256 MB or more of memory.
SketchUp requires 256MB or more of graphics card memory. You may be able to launch SketchUp, but performance/stability will be significantly impacted. We recommend you upgrade your graphics card in order to run SketchUp.

Note: We gather data on your graphics card memory by querying Microsoft’s System Information. On some cards, what Microsoft reports is incorrect. This can cause Checkup to issue this error falsely! The presence of this incorrect result will not prevent SketchUp from running.

The fact is, Microsoft knows exactly what display device is installed and also knows the exact driver and version version history. It is not at all difficult for any system checker to extract the correct system information. For example, Any of the driver updater programs I don’t use. Vray for example has an excellent built-in checker that finds any device/method that can be used for rendering. If you have a dedicated rendering GPU such as Nvidia Quadro or AMD Pro series installed, it knows. Only then will it allow the option to use either CPU or GPU for rendering.

Not only that but Nvidia and AMD each know (by checking MS System Data) what display device is installed and the driver installed. Any incompatible driver that might be downloaded will NOT install, period.

If I were able to contact Trimble I would recommend to them: 1) They add a link to there “help” documentation inside the program. 2) They go back to the drawing board and find out why other programs don’t have a problem correctly identifying system info, hardware and drivers instead of blaming the cause of their erroneous Error reporting on MS.