OpenGL 2.1 vs. 3.1 in SU?

[brodie]

ya ya, appeal to the masses and all that

Is there a difference between SU 7 & 8 in terms of OpenGL? I'm still running 7 as I haven't found anything in 8 that's worth the $100 upgrade fee.

-Brodie

[Gaieus]

I cannot remember what OpenGL 7 was using but I think some slightly smaller version.

But why don't you ate least download and try SU 8 free? It would be the same engine to have a look.

[brodie]

I downloaded it awhile back and ended up uninstalling it after awhile. The issues with having 2 version of SU on one machine just couldn't be outweighed by any benefit of having SU 8 on my computer. I never ran the test.time_display ruby though to see if there was a speed difference though (nor have I seen folks raving about speed improvements as happened in the 6 to 7 shift). Have you tested or heard any noticeable speed improvements from 7 to 8?

-Brodie

[Gaieus]

They constantly work on smaller adjustments from version to version in speed but indeed from 7.0 to 7.1, they completely rewrote the engine (it wasn't from 6 to 7). So I think yes, there is something but just minor difference.

[fuzzion]

I actually think this "lets make SU the Windows for 3d cad" is a good idea

if they then took the opportunity to make the SU Pro version a real

Professional version with quad core compatibility,greater polygon hold and workstation friendly

graphical acceleration. For now the Pro version is as enticing as broccoli

[Rich O Brien]

I love brocolli

[Chris Fullmer]

@unknownuser said:

I love brocolli

Just one more thing about you that seems to indicate that you're an 80 year old woman, Rich. I would have never believed the truth if I had not met you in person

[Rich O Brien]

@Chris
Freudian slip, i meant to say i love beer and debauchery sprinkled with some shenanigans! Speaking of Freud....

@unknownuser said:

It is amazing how we hold certain folks in history out in such high-esteem. Did you know that Freud may not have been the super psychologist we believe he was? In fact did you realize that he openly admitted that he figured out all about the human mind and psychology of people except he could not explain the Irish and their personality traits.

Indeed and with regard to Freud and Irish Blood; he might have a point the Irish are somewhat difficult to figure out. This human variation appears to activate chemicals in their brain faster than others and seems to have more high-level energy to ramp up for a cause of their choosing and although highly efficient with their use of those fiery genes (piss and vinegar) they do promote change, strength of character and the ability to press on often enough as history has indeed shown. Having a few "Mc's" in my own genetic line?

So is their something about the Irish that we do not know? Is there more to the story that we need to hear? What is it about the Irish and their personality that makes them so unique and so often puts them at the top of the food chain in society? Think about how many folks with Irish Blood are important folks in our society and modern civilizations. And if you use proper thinking methodology like a Mind Mapping Technique, maybe you can answer this question that Freud never could?

@Brodie
I'll leave this thread alone now....i'm as helpful as a sack of shite!

[dacad]

OpenGl 1.5?
That's not so bad...especially if we think it was released July 29 of...2003, and we are currently at version 4.1 so just 3-all-generations back...lol

Can we even buy a card today that doesn't support at least 2.1? If we saw a little speed change in 7.1 just for a slighter higher version of it, would like to see how it would run if it was optimised to one of the last versions, without counting the new features it could bring like tesselation...(I know the official answer is going to be "3D for everyone (even cavemen)" and "we don't need that" bla bla bla).

Well but it's good to now my gpu won't "sweat", money well spent on it...

[Gaieus]

@unknownuser said:

Can we even buy a card today that doesn't support at least 2.1?

Well, most "modern" integrated chipsets do not support 1.5 either. Even with the "so called" dedicated cards sometimes it is only written on the box but the drivers suck. I see hardware acceleration issues posted daily.

But then on the other hand, maybe Google indeed should not be so cautious with more advanced technology. But of course, I know close to nothing about these technical details so maybe missing the target here.

[dacad]

@unknownuser said:

OpenGl 1.5?
That's not so bad...especially if we think it was released July 29 of...2003, and we are currently at version 4.1 so just 3-all-generations back...lol

Can we even buy a card today that doesn't support at least 2.1? If we saw a little speed change in 7.1 just for a slighter higher version of it, would like to see how it would run if it was optimised to one of the last versions, without counting the new features it could bring like tesselation...(I know the official answer is going to be "3D for everyone (even cavemen)" and "we don't need that" bla bla bla).

Well but it's good to now my gpu won't "sweat", money well spent on it...

@gaieus said:

Well, most "modern" integrated chipsets do not support 1.5 either. Even with the "so called" dedicated cards sometimes it is only written on the box but the drivers suck.

But then on the other hand, maybe Google indeed should not be so cautious with more advanced technology.

Hi Gaieus

I can tell you that most firms I've seen that work on 3D,2D and film, all the computers don't have "integrated" graphics cards...That's one of the differences between Professional user and Casual/Hobby/Free users, that should be kept for the free version...a pity that just google doesn't realize that...
And amazingly seeing new hardware with problems running much older versions, doesn't surprise me at all (what should we do? keep and old version of drivers missing new stuff to run something much older than the current/standard used? What if it just run in Win95?should i keep that too?)

And, for me, advance technology it's CUDA, OpenCL, experimenting features, etc...OpenGL 2-3-4 are current technology for me...

[Gaieus]

I do not question that part of course. My card (bought it some year and a half ago) supports 2.1 and CUDA - do you think I do not wish if it could be exploited more efficiently?

Of course it is a different question how much more SU could exploit it...

[brodie]

I posted a question regarding this on the SU help forums. In case anyone wants to keep up and see if it gets a response... http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sketchup/thread?tid=0f01b03f40f7ef98&hl=en

-Brodie

[Gaieus]

Yeah, I saw it. IMO 4.1 cannot be a question yet as only extremely high and cards would support it. But something closer to 2.1 maybe.
Also notice that whenever some new OS comes out (like Win 7 lately), there are always driver issues with many cards. I guess the higher the OpenGL version the harder manufacturers supply the new drivers (as they are also working for the most common needs).

[dacad]

I agree Gaieus. 2.1 would probably be the sweat spot (just us thinking, I'm no programmer) since everyone could use it (mac just supports 2.x and they're releasing by the end of the year 3.0 for OSX).

But it really doesn't matter, since John Baccus already answered Brodie's question:

It wouldn't help much just some parts...just like 64 bits wouldn't help much just some parts, and multicore wouldn't help much just some parts, and professional graphics cards wouldn't help much just some parts...

And everything combined can help something? Maybe if we try to get the best from each, little by little, we can have something helping a lot in the end... Why Kronos Group keeps releasing new versions I don't understand: nor doesn't work faster, nor have features we can use... And the worst part seems that this is tight connected with the lack of new tools and innovation in the program (that's also why the shadow bug isn't solved...).

The good news is that now they can concentrate more in updating the modeling/animation/texturing tools just like they did with Pushpull 2.0... what a sad tool's update that was... lolol

Sorry for the comedy rant

[jbacus]

Hi guys,

I think I answered Brodie's question pretty clearly over in our user forum , but it doesn't look like that answer is making its way back here intact. Let me try to clarify.

Higher version numbers in the OpenGL spec (1.5 vs. 3.1) have no more impact on overall performance than do higher numbers in the HTML spec. HTML 5 offers developers some exciting new features, but doesn't inherently make pages in your web browser render faster than they did in HTML 2.0. Ditto for OpenGL 3.1.

Brodie: I can tell you're having difficulty decoding the spec on your new graphics card– I find the marketing lingo on those things pretty opaque myself. If you're truly pushing SketchUp as hard as you claim, you deserve a better board than the GeForce 310. You can get a very capable GTX 260 for under $200 on NewEgg these days, or a 470 for about $50 more. I think you'd be happier with those boards.

john
.

[brodie]

That explanation certainly makes it more clear for me. So updating wouldn't do anything in itself, but it may allow you add some more bells and whistles (or maybe not depending on what features they added and if they're applicable to SU - I'm far to lazy and dumb to find out what those features are).

John, if you haven't seen this, you may be interested in this graphics card comparison which uses SU as one of the test softwares http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/Reviews/Review076_1.asp

The only thing I learned from that website, when I looked at it awhile back is that the graphics cards are really erratic in terms of quality in viewports. In many cases a less expensive card did better than a more expensive one, or a card that was MUCH more expensive would only be slightly better than a cheapo one.

So I'm probably just going to try out the 310 and see how it goes. If I don't like it, I'll just replace it with the Quadro FX 3700 that I currently use and which has worked just fine for me for the last year or two.

-Brodie

[jason_maranto]

After all these hardware discussions I've come to the conclusion that the only major upgrade possible for a Sketchup user that will have any impact is themselves... meaning re-training themselves to work smarter within the limitations of the current system.

I will say that it is not a particularly compelling POV to pro users who can move onto "greener pastures" with multi-core, 64-bit, etc. type programs out there... I have the sense that alot of that is marketing hype, but the problem with marketing hype is it tends to work.

For what it's worth I can use Sketchup well at very high poly-counts without any real issues -- but I also dedicate alot of my time to "upgrading" myself.

Best,
Jason.

[jbacus]

@jason_maranto said:

After all these hardware discussions I've come to the conclusion that the only major upgrade possible for a Sketchup user that will have any impact is themselves... meaning re-training themselves to work smarter within the limitations of the current system.

I will say that it is not a particularly compelling POV to pro users who can move onto "greener pastures" with multi-core, 64-bit, etc. type programs out there... I have the sense that alot of that is marketing hype, but the problem with marketing hype is it tends to work.

For what it's worth I can use Sketchup well at very high poly-counts without any real issues -- but I also dedicate alot of my time to "upgrading" myself.

Best,
Jason.

I'm still not aware of any programs on the market today that do exactly what SketchUp does faster by leveraging multiprocessing or 64-bit technologies, though there are certainly other kinds of tools (specifically rendering apps) that can use those technologies to improve performance.

I think you make a really important point, though. Learning how to use a tool properly and effectively is the key to using it well. And ultimately, to being able to push its boundaries.

john
.

[brodie]

@unknownuser said:

I'm still not aware of any programs on the market today that do exactly what SketchUp does faster by leveraging multiprocessing or 64-bit technologies, though there are certainly other kinds of tools (specifically rendering apps) that can use those technologies to improve performance.

I think you make a really important point, though. Learning how to use a tool properly and effectively is the key to using it well. And ultimately, to being able to push its boundaries.

john
.

haha, John, you must be a masochist.

If SketchUp is only competing with companies who do "exactly what SketchUp does" then I don't think you have any competition at all, depending on how you define "what SketchUp does." And I'm not sure that he was necessarily talking about "faster," there are other aspects to performance and workflow.

But instead of drudging up the old argument, let me see if I've learned anything. Moving SU 64 bit would allow it to hold more polygons (presumably this is why 3ds Max has both 32 and 64 bit versions) and may help in a SU to Rendering workflow. However it takes a lot of polygons to reach the 3+ gig limit of 32 bit and long before you hit that, you'll run into other bottlenecks (am I on the right track here?).

As for Multiprocessing support, it just doesn't work with OpenGL so someone will need to invent a new OpenGLmulticore before it does anything at all for SU. How's that?

Just to derail things a bit, realtime rendering is all the rage right now. What if the SU viewport was seen as a VERY simply realtime rendering which used the CPU to actually render the scene as you moved around? Meh, probably a dumb idea. Maybe every time you moved around there would be a bit of lag as it had to rerender, I don't know.

-Brodie