Texture issue when rotating (AMD RX550)

SketchUp
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Hello everyone!
I would like to apologize from start because I have absolutely no idea how this software works. The reason why I’m creaing a new topic here is because I am a computer technician and one of my clients (who does not speak english) has a very weird issue that I would like to hear your opinion on:

My client is a graphic designer and has been using Sketchup for quite some time. Recently he had a VGA card problem and so we decided to replace it with a newer and better one. His old VGA was a Nvidia 7300LE with 256MB of DDR memory. It was really old and weak but apparently he could work on his projects with no serious problems. The new card that we bought was a GT730 with 2GB of DDR5 memory. We chose this specific model because he wanted a relatively cheap card that could support 3 monitors. Unfortunately, due to a major incompatibility issue with his old PC, we only managed to successfully connect 3 monitors to the GT730 ONCE and under very specific conditions! I will not bore you with the details because I dont think it will help. When we did manage to get a signal on all 3 monitors, the current project that he was working on was very well depicted and even though he had created some very complex items (like a tree with many leaves), when he was rotating the image, the textures where applied during the rotation with no problem. Ofcourse my client told me that he had noticed a big difference in how fast the program run compared to when his old graphics card was installed!

Now the issue begins when we decided to change the GT730 (because of incompatibility issue mentioned above) and instead get a Sapphire RX550 with 2GB DDR5 memory. We immediately installed the latest driver from the official AMD site and tested it only to find that not only was it notably slower than the GT730 but also it could not depict the textures of MANY objects while the image was rotating. It would remove the textures during rotation and re apply them to the image when the rotating stopped.

  1. There was no other change made to the specifications of the PC except for the VGA card
  2. There are constantly 3 monitors connected on the RX550 which all work fine
  3. A total of 4 graphics cards have been tested on this system: the original NVidia 7300LE, an equally old but considerably better NVidia 7600GT, the new NVidia GT730 and finally the AMD RX550. ONLY the AMD card presented this issue! And also was almost as slow as the old Nvidia cards!
  4. The RX550 has been tested thoroughly with 3dmark and it seems to be working just as it should.

Any ideas why this is happening?
Is it a settings issue?

Sorry for the long message

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That’s normal behavior, which SketchUp does automatically, to keep frame rate up.
The weaker the graphics card, the more it occurs.

SketchUp Hardware and Software Requirements — SketchUp Help
https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/36208

Model seems sticky after camera movement — SketchUp Help
https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/161783

Speeding Up Rendering with Fast Styles — SketchUp Help
https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000072

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But then how do you explain that it did not present this issue with the really old and MUCH weaker NVidia cards like the 7300LE and the 7600GT?

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Are the AMD drivers up to date? Traditionally, OpenGL support is better for Nvidia cards than AMD.

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Like I’ve already mentioned, the first thing we did was to download and install the latest AMD driver for the RX550.

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And AMD is notorious for being sub par when it comes to supplying suitable drivers for openGl.
An old Nvidia will often function better than a new AMD

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So If I try an older driver from AMD, would that do anything useful?

Does anybody else have a new AMD graphics card that causes the same issue with sketchup?

This is the card that we are using:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?pid=EBB5FCE8-FC92-4603-8D05-8BC8A2AF6E64&lang=eng

It shows in the specifications: OpenGL 4.5
Do I have to manually download and install something related to OpenGL or is the graphics card driver enough?

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It’s hard to tell if going back to an older driver version will help. It might. It might not. The next driver version they release might do a better job than the current one. As Box wrote in the post previous to your last one, AMD Radeon cards are notorious for poor OpenGL support. Historically nVidia has always been superior to Radeon in the OpenGL line.

You can try other driver versions and see what you get. If your time is worth anything, you might be wise to just get a new GeForce card and move on.

1 Like
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