I’m a kitchen and bath contractor (not a computer guy) and I’ve gotten pretty decent with SketchUp over the years and love it. The laptop I’m using is detailed in the picture below. I specifically bought a gaming computer for the graphics capability (thinking I was pretty smart) but I apparently failed miserably at my choice because the program got a LOT slower, not faster. I move a whole lot quicker than the program and I have to pause and let it catch up.
I’m going to buy a new laptop pretty soon. Anybody got any recommendations?
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Other questions …
In the OpenGL (panel), what is the anti-aliasing set to? (The higher the number, the better and smoother edges will be, but the slower SketchUp will render.)
In your modeling are you using a fast style ? (Fast styles have a little green clock overlay in the bottom right of their thumbnail image.) You can set up a dedicated scene page with a fast style for doing the modeling work, and separate scenes for printing or presentation using better styles (with profiles and textures switched on for example.)
BTW … 8GB of system RAM is on the lighter side. You could have the laptop memory upgraded. In a new laptop look for 16GB or 32GB minimum.
From my experience the fundamental things to look for are,
Fastest single core/thread speed of processor (multiple cores help with external rendering but sketchup only uses one) So less cores with more speed can be better that more cores. There are some good benchmark lists that can show you how various processors compare. Sometimes a particular i5 can be better than a specific i7 and so on, so it’s worth checking.
Best Nvidia graphic card you can afford but not the Quadro series, too expensive and lesser performance for SU
You have a reasonably capable laptop.
Hardware upgrades will always help but sometimes the problem isnt hardware it’s settings or something else.
Couple of things to try:
Make 1000% sure you are running in High Performance mode (not battery saver)
Try turning off the external monitor, if you have one.
Use Ctrl+Alt+Del then Task Manager > Performance to check what resources you are using while SketchUp is working - if your RAM is getting below 25% available then you need an upgrade. If your GPU is working at 100% then you know it’s a bottleneck.
Post an example of the sort of file you’re working on and I’ll let you know if its realistic to expect high performance.
Let us know what aspects of SKP performance are a problem for you -EG is it with shadows on, or with profile edges on, or LayOut performance?
Yeah I think your CPU is your weak point. I’ve compared it to the 2 intel based systems I use and your 7th gen i5 is actually worse in single thread than my 4th gen i7 that I have at home. You have a good GPU though. I’d follow Box’s advice on hardware. On passmark the Intel i5-12600k seems to be the sweet spot. PassMark - Intel Core i5-12600K - Price performance comparison but seems to be only for desktops at the moment.
