A new Sketchup engine.

[Phillip]

Perhaps the biggest area that Sketchup is trailing is that the software is not keeping up with the hardware capability.

Modern workstations such as the hp z420 offer multiple core processors, multi channel ram and powerful graphics processors - even a base workstation with 4 core xeon, 8gb ram and an nvidia q600 is not used to anything like its potential when using Sketchup 8.

This is frustrating and does little to endear the product going forward, particularly the professional 8 version. Better hardware merely sees a brute force improvement rather than that seen in other drawing software, even the benefits of a 64bit operating system are not being fully utilized.

To a lesser extent, as shown in recent unusual micro scale project, Sketchup showed an unwillingness to respond consistently in fractions of a millimeter, scaling up solved this - though it did further highlight the growing limitations of Sketchup's aging engine.

Perhaps then a lifting up of the underlying Sketchup code to a 2012 level, fully taking advantage of current common hardware technology without any modeling features being added would be best.

With an impending windows 8, a tablet orientated operating system hailing in the promise of a wacom tablet/workstation hybrid, the opening casm between sketchup and hardware/operating system advances is likely to broarden to an abyss. Its that prospect that concerns me most.

Its easy to find sketchup wizz help, the program has a great user base upon which to draw, all mostly self trained via the free version or the very low price of the proffesional version. Sketchup as a future annacronism will see this resource disappear - it will be back to the awkward days of expensive training and worse, the lack of trully intuative seats in the modern drawing office.