Quad core: slow

toxicvoxel

Jeff, your argument obviously does not support multi-threading...
Did anyone say that SU would be faster on Quad - all other things being equal?

What I did suggest is that the performance loss is propbably due to an inferior graphics card rather than the MC processor. This is supported by the response by Pazu to the question on the Google forums.
http://groups.google.com/group/Sketchup-Pro/browse_frm/thread/e1a7e5c20e16c98e/6c661597f33b7c47#6c661597f33b7c47

I suggest to you that waiting for HQ to rewrite the SU code rather than spending money on a good graphics card may not be realistic advice to the initial inquiry.

jeff hammond

seriously, how much of the problem is going to be solved by buying a thousand dollar video card?... i'm assuming the OP is working on fairly large drawings (garden design - plants/leaves/etc) without too much organization.. the best (and cheapest) solution would be to start using groups and components which can be hidden or replaced with low poly versions while doing the bulk of the project..

Anssi

The few "official" responses from the SU team to queries like this have always stressed that SU performance is more dependent on the CPU than on the graphics card, and that a "decent"(whatever is meant with it) card is enough. They also have said that the workload is divided between the CPU and GPU so that the CPU takes care of the geometry while textures and shadows are generated by the GPU.

My models are small, and I generally don't use tons of textures. My oldest computer is a 2.66 GHz P4 with a 64 Mb old ATI All-in-wonder card, and it runs SU 6 quite OK. At work I have a 3.6 GHz P4 with a Quadro FX 1400 card. Looking at the specs, it should run circles around the other, but in practice it is, well, just noticeably faster, as an user experience, the performance boost is even smaller than the difference in CPU clock speed.

Of course my next computer will be a multicore, but I just don't see a pressing need to upgrade just yet.

Anssi

toxicvoxel

Well the guy has already 'upgraded' to quadcore and is looking for a way to achieve performance comparable to his older machine - to which I have made my recommendation for a better graphics card based on my actual experience - which has been confirmed by a specialist on the Google forum that the specific card he uses is creating the bottleneck.

If the bloke has to go on the advice given by some here he should do one or a combination of the following:

1.Don't upgrade to multicore for the time being(Too late!)
2.Find a largely redundant & outdated single core Pentium 3GH+ instead and work with a single window session at a time. (!)
3. Wait for sketchup to support multithreading before spending any more money on a graphics card.(Yeah right!)
4. Work with smaller and better organised models than before.(Not always possible.)

In context with his question is this the most helpful response that this forum can offer?

jeff hammond

and..

5.. go spend a $1000+ on a graphics card so you'll be able to rotate your model more cleanly while shadows are turned on..

the only real solution here is to work in a more organized fashion... everything else in the thread simply states that what he is experiencing is normal and should be expected.. (well, at least what i think he's experiencing... he hasn't replied or gone into detail about what exactly he's experiencing)

toxicvoxel

I guess that answers my question.

Anssi

There has often been talk about the need for a SU benchmark. That would probably stop us from arguing.

About the video card issue: If it is reasonably current, and SU can be made to run with Hardware Acceleration on, I am rather convinced that changing it is not money well spent.

I have seen posts in these forums where people who have upgraded from a mediocre Geforce card to an ultracool whizbang QuadroFX complain about zero performance gain. (Yes, agreed, when speccing for a new machine for pro SU use you should go QuadroFX if you can afford it)

Anssi

toxicvoxel

Well Anssi, I actually use this combination of hardware, so I'm not speculating on this or giving second hand advice. I can only reiterate that in my experience a top-end card in conjunction with MC has speeded up my workflow significantly. - But then maybe this is my imagination...

PS: If you do a search you will find that I actually suggested that a benchmark be developed as a SCF community project, but it was pooh-poohed by the other ruby programmers. Maybe I will just have to write one myself if it means that we can eliminate speculative advice about machine performance.

s_arrow

First of all, thank very much for all of the answers and advices. I have two videos and a "sku" file uploaded if anyone can see if the composition is too complex:
Videos are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYFyHbNtHls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bsdNHqQ06Y
(sorry for the quality, but you can see clearly that the lines takes too long to show up after mouse clicking).

The "sku" file is uploaded at:
http://rapidshare.com/files/99299925/sketchuptest.rar

I'm really happy for all of your help.
Greets.

jeff hammond

wow.. that is the biggest skp i've ever opened and it definitely slows my system to a crawl.. there's well over a million edges and faces + tons of materials, images, etc.. sketchup simply isn't designed for this type of abuse..

--model info for those that haven't downloaded the file...
15.5 MB
Edges 857746
Faces 318839
Component Instances 137582
Guide Points 30
Groups 2659
Images 12
Component Definitions 108
Layers 121
Materials 171
Styles 1

looking forward to hearing how toxic's system deals with this thing..

remus

Thats a pretty weighty test file, surprisingly my system just about handled it, there was a second or two delay when orbiting, and i didnt dare to turn on shadows or xray, but you could work with the model if you needed to.

jeff hammond

@remus said:

Thats a pretty weighty test file, surprisingly my system just about handled it, there was a second or two delay when orbiting, and i didnt dare to turn on shadows or xray, but you could work with the model if you needed to.

yeah, i guess if you have tons of patience it would be workable but seriously, i couldn't handle it.. i can rotate it ok, draw lines decently, etc.. the problem starts showing itself once you try drawing some stuff..

ex - it takes me 6 seconds to draw a sphere in a blank window.. with this drawing, it took me 27 seconds.. going off of that, it would take a full days work to draw something that would take 2hrs.. i'll pass.. (and i didn't have to rotate the model in order to draw the sphere - doing that would take even longer)

i would seriously look into some renderers to deal with all these plants instead of trying to draw them all in sketchup.. plus, the final output will look way better anyway..

remus

Yeah, im sure it would be a far better idea to use something like those proxies kwist was experimenting with. Or even just add the components in the renderer.

sketch3d.de

@anssi said:

... upgraded from a mediocre Geforce card to an ultracool whizbang QuadroFX complain about zero performance gain.

sure, comparing speed of a GeForce w/ an Quadro FX in the same price range will show a better performance for the GF. The advantage of the Quadros is the quailty of the driver especially if a full and stable OpenGL support is required.

anyway, SU is currently CPU driven sothat the fastest dual core CPU is probably the best choice for a performance optimized system and probably the best bang-for-the-buck compared w/ quad core systems.

iirc for getting the user the impression that a system double its speed the system performance needs to be roughly quadrupled

rewriting SU for a multi-threading of modeling operations is probably a difficult task compared with slicing a render output in mutiple chunks, may need some expenditure/time.

Norbert

Anssi

@unknownuser said:

@remus said:

Thats a pretty weighty test file, surprisingly my system just about handled it, there was a second or two delay when orbiting, and i didnt dare to turn on shadows or xray, but you could work with the model if you needed to.

yeah, i guess if you have tons of patience it would be workable but seriously, i couldn't handle it.. i can rotate it ok, draw lines decently, etc.. the problem starts showing itself once you try drawing some stuff..

ex - it takes me 6 seconds to draw a sphere in a blank window.. with this drawing, it took me 27 seconds.. going off of that, it would take a full days work to draw something that would take 2hrs.. i'll pass.. (and i didn't have to rotate the model in order to draw the sphere - doing that would take even longer)

i would seriously look into some renderers to deal with all these plants instead of trying to draw them all in sketchup.. plus, the final output will look way better anyway..

The filesize went to half after purging. Still it is enormous. And as expected, it's the 3D plants that make it slow. Erase them (or replace with something simple), and it flies.

I did not try drawing in it. Before I did anything with it, zooming to extents took 7 seconds, and "purging all" took 40 seconds on my humble non-HT 2.8 GHz P4 laptop.

Anssi

toxicvoxel

While this file is obviously fairly heavy I do not have a problem working in it.(But then maybe it's because I wasted the money on the graphics card...)

But you won't believe me unless you see it for yourself.Quadro FX4600

BEAR IN MIND I WAS RECORDING THE AVI IN THE BACKGROUND WHILE THIS WAS GOING ON.

Now try doing that on your single core Pentium with a gaming card!

toxicvoxel

I believe that the Sketchup-multicore-performance-loss reports are an urban myth not based on actual experience.

Yes SU does not support multi-threading. But most often Sketchup will be used in conjunction with multiple other applications open at the same time and here multi-core machines show a significant advantage over single core machines where the second/third/fourth cores can be used by the other applications while SU does not have to share a single (albeit slightly faster) processor with other applications and even the activities of the OS. The newer Dual/Quad (SANTA ROSA or newer) cores also integrate dynamic accelleration technology that overclocks the first core for single threaded applications:

@unknownuser said:

WIKIPEDIA
The [Centrino] Santa Rosa platform comes with dynamic acceleration technology. It allows single threaded applications to execute faster. When a single threaded application is running the CPU can turn off one of the CPU cores and overclock the active core. In this way the CPU maintains the same Thermal Profile as it would when both cores are active. Santa Rosa performs well as a mobile gaming platform due to its ability to switch between single threaded and multithreaded tasks.[2]. Other power savings come from an Enhanced Sleep state where both the CPU cores and the chipset will power down.

Centrino - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

I use a dual core laptop (HP compaq 8710W 2.2GH proc. with 2G ram) that blows the socks off my old Pentium 3.4 machine with the same RAM. More recently I bought a 2.4 GH Quad core machine that is a lot faster than the laptop using Sketchup and SO quick switching between AutCAD, Excel, Painter and CorelDRAW etc. - all of which I now leave open most of the time while working with SU.

Therefor I believe that the real bottleneck is the graphics card. Previously I used an NVIDEA Geforce 6600. The laptop has a Quadro FX1600 and the QuadCore a Quadro FX4600.

BUY the best one you can afford and dont believe those knocking multiple cores.

jeff hammond

@toxicvoxel said:

While this file is obviously fairly heavy I do not have a problem working in it.(But then maybe it's because I wasted the money on the graphics card...)

But you won't believe me unless you see it for yourself.[attachment=0:2vhf26pl]quadrofx4700-5.zip[/attachment:2vhf26pl]

BEAR IN MIND I WAS RECORDING THE AVI IN THE BACKGROUND WHILE THIS WAS GOING ON.

Now try doing that on your single core Pentium with a gaming card!

come on man, that's a little misleading don't you think?.. at the very least you can mention that you made the movie with shaded face style turned on (instead of shaded with textures)... i'm starting to think that you don't care that you're recommending spending $1600 (or whatever the price of that thing) for very little sketchup enhancement.. you just want to justify in your mind that it was money well spent (amongst other reasons i imagine).. i can make that same video with my lowly geforce..

(and this is actually some round about good advice to the OP.. working in that mode does speed things up considerably)

toxicvoxel

Jeff,

Did I recommend spending $1600? I do not think so.
I'm sorry that you feel that I am trying to 'mislead' anyone by working with shaded mode. Is it not clear to anyone looking at the video that that is the case, and would that not be the most 'efficient' way of working with large models? (- which is what I thought you were advocating.) By 'very least' should I understand that you mean that there are other things which I am not disclosing?

And off-course you could make a movie on your video-card. With the multicore this operation would not affect Sketchup performance which is being processed on another core, which would not be the case on a single processor where both operations would be competing for processing on a single unit - a point I thought I made in my original post.

Despite your suggestion that I have alterior motives, (which is quite offensive actually) I can asure you that my intention on this thread was to help the gentleman identify why he was having difficulty working on the model with the QC. Was my advice not valid and consistent throughout and is it not supported by the video I posted? Did you yourself not request my feedback on this model in your earlier posting?

I think you should rather consider your own underlying motive in posting your last message instead of publicly casting doubt on someone who has offered a valid point of view based on actual experience in context with the original request.

I am sorry if my own experience does not support the popular myth propagated on this forum.

jeff hammond

@toxicvoxel said:

Jeff,

Did I recommend spending $1600? I do not think so.

maybe not - i might be assuming that based off of certain things you said-

***"I suggest to you that waiting for HQ to rewrite the SU code rather than spending money on a good graphics card may not be realistic advice to the initial inquiry"

"to which I have made my recommendation for a better graphics card based on my actual experience"

"While this file is obviously fairly heavy I do not have a problem working in it.(But then maybe it's because I wasted the money on the graphics card...) But you won't believe me unless you see it for yourself.
quadrofx4700-5.zip
Quadro FX4600"***

@unknownuser said:

I'm sorry that you feel that I am trying to 'mislead' anyone by working with shaded mode. Is it not clear to anyone looking at the video that that is the case, and would that not be the most 'efficient' way of working with large models? (- which is what I thought you were advocating.)

well no, it's not obvious.. there's only one tiny segment where you can actually tell.. while rotating in shaded with texture mode, the textures still disappear.. it's just that you have to wait for them to reappear before drawing anything else... with non texture mode, you don't have to wait..

@unknownuser said:

By 'very least' should I understand that you mean that there are other things which I am not disclosing?

i was just implying something deeper but it's a cheap stab so i take it back..

@unknownuser said:

And off-course you could make a movie on your video-card. With the multicore this operation would not affect Sketchup performance which is being processed on another core, which would not be the case on a single processor where both operations would be competing for processing on a single unit - a point I thought I made in my original post.

i didn't mean actually record the movie while i was also working on the file.. i meant that my computer handled the file the same as your movie shows.. i'll rephrase that to 'i could record a movie of my monitor using my handycam and it will show the same performance'

being able to record a movie while working on a file IS a testament to multicores..

@unknownuser said:

Despite your suggestion that I have alterior motives, (which is quite offensive actually) I can asure you that my intention on this thread was to help the gentleman identify why he was having difficulty working on the model with the QC. Was my advice not valid and consistent throughout and is it not supported by the video I posted? Did you yourself not request my feedback on this model in your earlier posting?

well, three people replied that their computers were having a rough time working with the file and you stepped in and said you had no problems at all.. i highly (highly) doubt any of the others were working with the model in the same manner as you but you've implied that your quadro has saved the day.. i think if you were really trying to help the OP, you would've recommend he do this as well because that is really what allowed the performance boost.. (which would coincide with earlier suggestions relating to working in a more organized fashion)...

the original poster's problem specifically mentioned his old single core computer out performed his new quad when using sketchup.. it said nothing about multitasking etc and i seriously believe he doesn't care about that in this case.. he wants to work on this file with a theoretic 4x speed boost and was wondering why that wasn't happening.. the advice to get a very fast chip and/or work more efficiently are the very real solutions and a new graphics card is not.. if you don't want to believe that then i'm ok with it.. (and yes, i think it would be dumb for him to run out and get another box to run sketchup with.. that would speed his drawing up though and he could do it cheaper than buying a quadro.. another thing you don't want to believe and sure it sounds silly atm but the next version of su will probably deal with this exact problem.. if you knew the next release was less than 6months away, would this advice still sound so silly to you?

@unknownuser said:

I think you should rather consider your own underlying motive in posting your last message instead of publicly casting doubt on someone who has offered a valid point of view based on actual experience in context with the original request.

i already considered it as i was typing.. i was being an ass.. on purpose..

@unknownuser said:

I am sorry if my own experience does not support the popular myth propagated on this forum.

that's the thing.. it's not a myth.. (again, i'm not talking about multi tasking here - i have a quad and i love the fact that i can do things with it that are virtually impossible to do with my old computers)..