Vista performance issue fixed.

CPhillips

I have been getting really lousy performance under Sketchup. Ever few seconds there would be a very short dip in the frame rate. It made everything look jerky.

I finally found the solution today. It turns out that OpenGL has a problem with Vista and Multi-core CPU's. Game players have known about it for a while. The solution is to limit Sketchup to only use one core as described here:
http://masolution.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-use-only-one-core-of-multi-core.html

I had to do the second "The permanent method" to make it work. But now its smooth as glass.

Your mileage may very.
Chris

dylan

Thanks for ther info Chris.
I only have Vista on my laptop and so don't get to model with it much but this will certainly be a useful tweak.

Alan Fraser

Thanks for those tips, guys. I recently had to buy a new desktop system, which of course has Vista...dual core processor. I've been getting some serious performance and graphic issues with it when working with imported images (like the drawing area just goes black and the program stops responding) even though it has an nVidia card. I've been contemplating running SU in XP compatibilty mode, but I'll give this a twirl too.

tbd

that is weird - on my Q6600(4 cores)/Vista if I move the affinity to 1 core it goes worse. so I am using all 4 cores and works fine for me

testing:

get Process Explorer - best task manager ever (you can see each core, history and other advanced features)
open a model that has the complexity that you usually work
open RubyConsole
type Test.time_display 500

richcat

I wonder if this will help its is a free program from http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bang-dual-processing-buck,815.html
called Task Assignment Manager
As we all know Sketchup is a single core, non hyper threading application.

I have been giving it a go since last week, and I have only just read the whole article, including the bit about hyper threading.

You can set it up so that sketchup is permanently assigned to a paricular core from boot up (I put it in my startup folder), but the big thing is you change it on the fly when using a rendering program from within sketchup, or anything else or if you just want to balance you resources, across cores etc.

I have not tried it on VISTA, as I don't have a system running it.

richcat

Thanks TBD I'll give that ago as well

AndriyG81

One more utility you guys might find useful called Process Lasso
It allows you to set processor and it allows you to set task priority for application. It's main function is to throttle down processes on a background to give more for your foreground app. Been using it for a wile

http://www.bitsum.com/prolasso.php

CPhillips

I had the same result (bad performance) when I ran Sketchup and then adjusted the affinity. I needed to have it set using the other method before it worked.

@unknownuser said:

that is weird - on my Q6600(4 cores)/Vista if I move the affinity to 1 core it goes worse. so I am using all 4 cores and works fine for me

testing:

get Process Explorer - best task manager ever (you can see each core, history and other advanced features)

open a model that has the complexity that you usually work

open RubyConsole

type Test.time_display 500

thomthom

Is that under certain hardware config that it's slow? Because I've not noticed anything on my AMD dual code system with Vista.

CPhillips

Could be. I have Intel Core Duo and an NVidia 7900 video card.

Stu

I've been running SU on a laptop with Vista for five or six months now without any noticable performance issues.

2.2 Core Duo, 256Mb 8600 nVidia card.