Viewport slows with Ambient occlusion Macbookpro M1 using default screen resolution

Technical Problems SketchUp
1

I am using Sketchup pro 2024 on an M1 macbook pro running the latest version of SU Mac OS Sequoia 15.1 etc.

Interestingly the default screen resolution for this is 1440x900. This is a scaled resolution I believe but it’s what you get if you don’t change anything. I noticed that viewport navigation performance with ambient occlusion enabled using an external display with a resolution of 1920x1200 was way faster than my laptop screen. So, I changed my laptop screen from the default to 1920x1200, performance way faster also 2048x1280 fast, 2560x1600 fast as well. I assume that there is a sketchup relationship when mac is scaling the screen resolution and the AO overlay gets messed up or slowed down in the process.

I thought this might be useful information for someone. The workaround is obviously to either turn off AO or change the default screen resolution.

Best,
Matt

2

scaling the resolution is, as far as I know, artificial. it’s like the zoom on PC. so the graphics card has to do extra work.
I have a 1920 x 1080 external screen, and using an app I could upscale the resolution, and I got a similar problem when playing some games and working in photoshop, because of the extra load on the GPU, lag and lower FPS.

Ambiant occlusion uses Metal, the newest graphics tool by apple. so it’s already consuming more ressources than before. could be that your GPU has to “share” its processes with upscaling.

3

AO is a presentation feature that should only be used in a presentation style assigned to scenes set up for export or rendering. You should not need to be moving the camera much once these scenes are setup.

Modeling however should be done in a specific scene for working using a fast style with all presentation styling features switched off.

2 Likes
4

Thanks for both replies and the links. Dan you are absolutely right and it’s what I end up doing. But you cant deny…, it’s fun to zoom around a model with ambient occlusion turned on!

5

I rather think that is what I did in my previous post. But hey if you’re having fun, enjoy.

I think that the display engines are designed to drop out detail as needed the more complex the model is in the view. But who knows? Maybe there is some bug as the feature is relatively new, or perhaps the code will be improved as time permits.