Increasing Sketchup's Performance?

[mrjumpmanv2]

Sketchup Pro

I have a few questions regarding sketchup pro (2013), mainly i'm curious whether or not it can take advantage of my hardware more than sketchup 8 currently can. I already have hardware acceleration and although I'm working on a pretty big model I'd imagine my computer should handle it with ease.

Hardware that i know of are
2TB SATA 6Gb/s (7,200RPM) 64MB Cache
i7-4820K CPU (3.70GHz)
windows 7 64bit
16gb RAM quad channel DDR3 (1600MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce

It has blue LEDs for extra boosted speed =p

I've been using sketchup for 7 or 8 years now and i was hoping that this new computer would be able to handle virtually any sized model but something tells me that there's something going on with sketchup that prevents it from utilizing all of my hardware, I doubt sketchup pro would fix that so is there any other options available to improve hardware acceleration? I already have hardware acceleration on. The sketchup help website recommended "emulation mode" but i have no clue what that is. (http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/36235 )

I use components very efficiently.
I use layers efficiently too.
I don't normally use textures or images or even more than a few materials.
I use the most basic style available.
I'm using sketchup 8
I purge unused whenever I think I need to.
currently the slow file i'm working with is 26mb but I have another 32mb file that runs just fine.
The attached file shows model stats.

Any suggestions for increasing the performance of sketchup would be greatly appreciated, I apologize if this problem has already been solved in another post.

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[unearthed]

How many edges does your 32mb file have? Because it seems (IMO) that edge number is the real determinant of speed.

[pcmoor]

I would group a lot of those edges/faces into groups

[unearthed]

If you have a large OR complex (many edges) model it pays to use proxy (simple) objects for when you're moving the model. for instance I have scenes in pairs, one with proxy objects for moving around and editing, the other with the full objects for exporting to LO or for rendering etc.

[JQL]

unearthed,

If you use your models to render did you check to see if your renderer allows for proxies?

If so you could create proxies for those models and the render engine will autoswap them for the fully detailed and material ready models.

Thea render works greatly for proxy management.

[AdamB]

Far too many ComponentInstances.

Look to judiciously explode the contents of some Components.

[mrjumpmanv2]

Here's the two stats on the different models.
32mb model
1mil edges
1200 component definitions
6500 component instances

26mb model
1.6mil edges
681 component definitions
6291 component instances

I'm more looking for a way to improve hardware acceleration on my nice new computer which seems to not be utilizing all of its nice new hardware. Workarounds for utilizing the model more efficiently isn't very important since I already have plenty of experience using components to reduce the load on my computer. I do like the idea of using a proxy though.

The original post didn't really pertain to rendering so i'd rather stay on topic too...

[sketchuh]

i have the same question though. don't know why sketchup crashes easily. i have a nice computer too.

[Trogluddite]

@mrjumpmanv2 said:

something tells me that there's something going on with sketchup that prevents it from utilizing all of my hardware

You got that exactly right...
Although your shiny new i7 CPU has (I guess) four cores, the way that Sketchup is built only allows it to use one of them for modelling. Other cores might still get used for 'low priority' threads such as dealing with the file system etc., so there will be some "sharing" of the CPU load. However, the really CPU intensive stuff is not able to utilise any 'surplus' power that other CPU cores might have available. This will be clearly visible if you check out the 'Performance' graphs in the Windows Task Manager - no matter how hard you make Sketchup work, things will hit a 'glass ceiling'.

The mention of 'emulation mode' is because Sketchup is still coded as a 32bit application - so when you use it on a 64bit machine, Windows employs some trickery to make it compatible. Very often, this will be engaged automatically, so you won't be aware of it.
That shouldn't affect 'number-crunching' performance too badly, though it can restrict how much of your 16GB RAM Sketchup is allowed to use (32bit numbers aren't big enough to hold very large memory addresses). For a very large model that won't fit into the allowed space, this could potentially slow things down due to using the HDD as 'virtual memory'.
If high virtual memory usage is causing a bottleneck, moving the virtual memory to a super-fast solid-state drive may help - but I don't use files anything like as large as yours, so I'm unable to say whether that would be a definite improvement in your case.

[AirWindSolar]

@trogluddite said:

For a very large model that won't fit into the allowed space, this could potentially slow things down due to using the HDD as 'virtual memory'.
If high virtual memory usage is causing a bottleneck, moving the virtual memory to a super-fast solid-state drive may help - but I don't use files anything like as large as yours, so I'm unable to say whether that would be a definite improvement in your case.

Reminds me of the downright goofy old trick of setting up a RAMdrive and moving some earlier version of Windows' pagefile to it, since that version wasn't capable of using even half the fairly common amount of memory for moderately high end machines at the time.

[jeff hammond]

your model is just too large for sketchup to handle.. that's all there is to it.
sketchup (imo) is for models containing less than ~100,000 polys

the best thing you can do is to put all those trees (or whatever the bulk of the 1.5m edges are) on a separate layer and keep them hidden while drawing.. only bring them out for final exports- and suffer through the navigation.

if the actual object you're working on has (and needs) 1.5m edges.. learn another software

[gilles]

Try ghost comp:

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21469#p180536

[JQL]

Maybe you can also split sketchup model in manageable pieces wich would be big components and Xref them by using save as on context menu and reload on same menu.

There are some plugins to help you on this:

• Xref tools;
• Linkfile;
• Component manager (this one is new and being worked on but nice).

[mrjumpmanv2]

Thanks for all the advice guys, really shame that sketchup can't utilize all of this stuff.

[JQL]

Oh well! it's so much fun to work with until it drops into it's frozen state...

[mrjumpmanv2]

Figured out the problem, turns out it's from autosaving, i have it set to autosave every minute or so. I'd imagine having an SSD would fix the problem to an extent since my HDD is relatively slow.

[mac1]

I have SSD and 2TB HHD like you and I cannot see any significant difference although speed test would probably show some. Unlike x86 where the RAM is split between the kernel and su so each would get 2 GB, for 64 bit SU can use all of 4 GB. Some M boards have some BIOS option you can set that may help; look for some thing like"use max memory" and turn off( prevents the kerenel for hogging memory), look for " use shared memory and turn on".
You best bet is to reduce the rendering load when you are modeling like use layers, monochrome, scenes and use textures for show and tell. Previously I have found turning transparency off helped a lots but have not checked for a long time.