Sketchup-on-linux: performance test

[Aerilius]

I'm still trying to find a way to use Sketchup on the operating system I like. Currently, Sketchup 6 & 7 (not yet 7.1) work in Wine on linux poorly rather than well. It is possible to use them, but we have to accept the bugs in the texturing tools and in the save function. Neither does Google contribute to make it more usable, nor does Microsoft think about supporting the wine project. Today I tried a different way, running Sketchup in a minimalist XP in a virtual machine on linux.

The first impression: it runs WITHOUT ANY bugs. And the further tests surprised me, because it is always said that virtual machines are not a good solution, that means running 2 OS should be much less efficient than using wine.

I used an extremly complex test model and did two different tests with the ruby command 'Test.time_display':

1. lines and shaded faces,
2. lines and textures and shadows.
   The results depend largely on the model that I used, so it is rather a relative comparison.
   ****```

frame rates (frames/second), the higher the better

 1. shaded faces                               2. textured faces + shadows
 normal XP    Wine     XP in VirtualBox        normal XP    Wine    XP in VirtualBox

SU6 5.1 2.1 4.2 0.34 0.075 0.125
SU7 4.9 1.55 4.01 0.33 0.065 0.13
SU7.1 20.5 1.27 5.2 5.3 1.09 1.65

While wine does not much more than supplying the windows applications with missing windows kernel files (...), I needed to run an additional operating system. With the program nLite, it is possible to make an XP installation cd with <160MB and a final install of 350MB, it needs only 50MB ram instead of a normal XP with ~400MB ram.

The numbers show the performance increase from SU7.0 to SU7.1. Also, at least for textures turned off, VirtualBox can already compete with Sketchup on XP. I think the difference for the textured case is because hardware acceleration was simulated (there is also an experimental version of VirtualBox which uses the real hardware for acceleration, but did not yet work). Additionally I should say that I allowed VirtualBox to use only one quarter of the ram.

[Aerilius]

I tried the last one again with twice the RAM (SU7.1, textured, shadows): 2.8 f/s
Calculated to the full ram, it would reach the same value as on XP, but of course the host operating system also needs a bit ram.

[Panga]

Good news, i also tried sketchup man times in Linux, with wine or equivalents. I'll try your way soon. Thanks for the info !!

[Aerilius]

Today, I got the new Sketchup 7.1 to run in wine. The speed improvements are incredible, it is up to 16 times faster.
**to complete the comparison
SU7.1 (wine) frames per second

1. shaded faces: 1.266
2. textured faces, shadows: 1.091**

[Panga]

Hi Aerilius,

You said in your first post that you try sketchup under a xp virtual machine. Which software did you use for that : vmware server, virtualbox ??
I just tried to do it under a windows 7 virtual machine with virtual box but it seems that virtualbox don't offers opengl right now, so sketchup did not start.

[juan974]

i'm really suprised that framerate grows 4 times from 7.0 to 7.1 on normal xp for shaded and 15 times for shaded whit textures whit virtual box ...

[Aerilius]

@Panga:
I used VirtualBox 3.0.10 on linux.
I found the solution on wikipedia: VirtualBox does support OpenGL (only 32-bit windows XP and Vista, linux, solaris) after having installed the "Guest Additions" (see manual, it's like a setup cd that you put in the virtual operating system)

@juan974:
I have not yet thought about it... Interesting . The XP on the Virtual Machine cannot be completely compared to a normal XP on a real computer, VirtualBox does not support all techniques that Sketchup can use, like hardware acceleration. Also I used a very stripped down Windows XP which can of course not use the full ram (in my case I allowed it only to use 192MB) because otherwise the host operating system cannot work. The minimal XP install cd can be created with nLite.

Luckily SU7.1 works now also in Wine on linux without problems, so I only need VirtualBox for placing models in Google Earth. The above test made me wonder why SU runs faster in a virtual machine than in wine...