Hi,
I have been an avid Sketchup user for many years now and I’ve always been curious about something. I am a Civil Designer and have high-end machines to perform my work within other software packs.
When using Sketchup with complex models it always gets boggy and jumpy. This can be either a complex piece of equipment or a surface imported from another piece of software. My current machine has 3 12GB Titan X Cards in it 32GB RAM, and a high-end liquid cooled I7. When monitoring GPU & CPU load nothing is even registering on the cpu or cards yet Sketchup is bogging out?
Does anyone have any recommendations for what I can do to allow this software access to the power of my entire system?
I’ve adjusted all of the settings in the Nvidia Control Panel telling Sketchup to use all three cards, max power, Cuda, Non-Cuda, yadda yadda, with no changes to Sketchup’s performance.
SketchUp only uses 1 core on the CPU so once you get to a certain level with a GPU it makes no difference really, especially in SLI. I see no difference between my various GPU’s of differing capabilities, what makes the difference is my CPU and RAM mostly.
For serious CAD, it’s something SketchUp was not built for (in terms of file complexity). The options available when working with complex files are:
A mastery of layers
Super clean geometry and group/component control
Creating the file in multiple files and only ‘assembling’ into a master file for renders or other exports
Creating the file in multiple files and assembling in something else that deals with higher poly count better such as Blender
Using option 1 and 2 is usually enough for me, 3 is worst case scenarios and 4 I never use unless the source files are coming from something else other than SketchUp (a CAD model for a vehicle for example thats super heavy, I clean this up in Rhino or Blender first and then import into SketchUp).