As I suspected … once again, no hardware solutions to the core LayOut software flaws …
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“This is because it is a software performance issue …”
I agree completely, which means that we, the actual users of LayOut, have very little we can do to improve things. We can buy the highest end hardware with monster graphics cards, and get only a wee bit of improvement. We can adopt all the best practices and workflow behaviors that this community has painfully learned and developed over the years, and it doesn’t make much of a dent in LayOut’s performance.
Is it just my imagination, or has LayOut been like this forever? Trimble has given us little tweaks over the years, but they have avoided the ground up rewrite of the underlying code that seems to be needed.
As I’ve said on this forum before, maybe Trimble feels they just don’t have to make the effort to totally overhaul LayOut. Since SketchUp is so great, and LayOut automatically gets sold as part of the Pro package, we keep buying SketchUp, no matter what. So, no penalty or incentive for Trimble. It keeps selling, so why do anything?
Now if LayOut had to sell in the market on it’s own, then Trimble would get a very different message from the marketplace! They would receive real value based feedback from the community, and it probably wouldn’t be positive or encouraging. I don’t think LayOut would sell or survive out there on it’s own.
Basically if you want to buy the beautiful racehorse, you get the ugly worn out nag as part of the deal!
Trimble has an opportunity to turn this win/lose proposition into a win/win, if they would only step up and make the effort. I wish I knew why they can’t see this, why they won’t make this obvious and much needed improvement!
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I whole-heartedly concur with all your points. Layout is a dog (an un-flattering British term) in terms of performance. This has been the case for years.
There were display issues for Mac users in regards to style representation and transparency that didn’t get fixed for two years! Hence why I’m sticking to 2019 (19.3.252).
Ironically, Layout actually could be the Crown Jewel for the SU Pro suite. Its output is excellent but the journey is awful.
What is the point of being able to create beautiful models and designs in SketchUp to then be hamstrung at the point of communication and client presentation. I just don’t get it.
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Crown Jewel huh? That would take some work! Wouldn’t that be nice!
BTW, are you British?
Hi,
I can’t give an accurate comparison between the hybrid (Fusion) SSD and the typical SSD as I haven’t tested it. I’m sure there will be a small improvement, but the law of diminishing returns no doubt kicks in.
Certainly there is a noticeable improvement comparing Sata HDD to SSD, but not so much if you move from SSD to a faster NAND drive. The Real problem (and the reason I mentioned it) is that working on a network is majorly slow.
In my experience, there are three seperate parts to LayOut performance:
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Sluggishness due to the interface (eg selecting, dragging, applying colours). This is combination of CPU speed and a tiny bit related to GPU speed. Turning off snapping is about all we can do to improve this.
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Rendering of viewports - partcularly Vector and Hybrid. Again the majority of this is reliant on CPU speed (single core only) and there’s little we can do to resolve or improve it. Keeping models simple and working in low-quality Raster Mode is a workaround.
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Model updates/synchronising and saving. This is evident when models become very slow to update or relink, and is particularly noticeable if you have complex models and scenes that generate multi-page and multi-viewport LayOut documents. This is the area that relies on hard drive performance.
As a hypothetical example …If you “update” layout with your 300mb model it may take:
- 45 mins on a fast network connection, and it may crash while doing so…
- 15 mins on a Sata HDD
- 10 mins on a SSD
- 8 mins on a NAND drive.
I would guess a Hyrid SSD may be 12-13 mins…just to give a very rough indication comparitive types. the Hybrid part of the SSD may be 200mb or so, so if your model exceeds that i would guess it runs at regular HDD speeds.
RAM has little to do with it unless you’re running out of RAM during the operation of LayOut (then it will become unresponsive often). That’s unlikely as LayOut doesn’t use much RAM.
But one of it’s paritcular issues is that every LayOut file basically contains a copy of the SKP file, so if you have a SKP file which is of a moderate size (100mb+) and even if you want to render just one very small part of that model, LayOut must import/update the entire SKP file. And it must do this for every viewport.
Fast hard drives tend to give a small boost in a lot of areas eg saving, opening, transferring, copy & pasting large items, importing photos or models, printing or saving to PDF.
I wish somebody at Trimble would give a really detailed run down on all the performance aspects of SU & LO, particuarly for large/complex projects. I’ve done my best to give pointers, but not much is based on scientific testing or a deep understanding of the software. Certainly it is very confusing that SketchUp can render edges in very quick time, but LayOut takes forever to render vector edges on the same model. There’s a bottleneck somewhere which is difficult to understand. To me it seems to be the difference between GPU-based rendering and CPU-based.
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AK_SAM,
Thanks for a very comprehensive analysis and response!
I’ll have to think on this and I’ll say more later …
Beamer
Thanks AK_SAM,
Wouldn’t it be nice (and helpful) if Trimble WOULD provide some explanation about LayOut performance, if we knew more, maybe we could come up with further “workarounds” to improve our experience! Evidently they don’t really want to discuss or admit the many LayOut shortcomings …
The “bottleneck” is built into the underlying code somewhere (or everywhere?), and to date, the message seems to be “live with it”!
I claim no expertise here, but in my research it seemed clear that if I wanted to do anything serious in 3D I’d have to move from Mac to PC. As example, I was interested in iClone but they don’t even make a Mac version for that product as they consider iClone on a Mac to be mostly hopeless.
That said, SketchUp seems to work fine on my nine year old Mac, though I’m new here and am not doing anything advanced.
However, when import my SketchUp files in to a Mac video editor I start wishing I had more horsepower. I can tell that at some point I’ll have added too many components to my scene for it to be fun to work with.
Depends what you mean by “serious”. There are definitely some software ‘gaps’ but it depends on what you want to achieve and your intended software route.
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