Google is Listening!
-
Hi Everyone,
Google is listening and wants to hear what you have to say about SketchUp!
Today, we are launching "Google SketchUp Questions and Ideas" a moderator series where you can post questions and share your ideas directly with the SketchUp team. This is just like meeting engineers face-to-face. You can ask them your most pressing questions and tell them your most brilliant ideas. While you’re on the series, vote on other users’ questions and ideas. The SketchUp team will respond directly to the most popular ones! Look for their responses on individual suggestions, on the Google SketchUp Blog or in this forum.
There are a few things to keep in mind when on the series. Please search for your question or idea FIRST to make sure it hasn’t already been posted. If it has, you should vote for it instead of writing in a duplicate. Also make sure to only submit one question or idea at a time. If you follow these rules, it allows for more accurate results of the voting, and the SketchUp team will be able to comment on what you really care about.
Don't wait long to post, the series will only be up for one month!
Carolyn
-
Hi Carolyn and welcome to SCF!
(Please, old members, easy with our new member, she has just joined the SU Team...)
-
Welcome LadyBugs... we always considered this the place where we told Google our Ideas and Problems... we know you're watching.
as for the site I'll go check it out and vote for what I know will be top of the list... 64Bit!
-
@krisidious said:
Welcome LadyBugs... we always considered this the place where we told Google our Ideas and Problems... we know you're watching.
as for the site I'll go check it out and vote for what I know will be top of the list... 64Bit!
Me too. What ever good it will do...
Edit:
I just went there and J. Bacus answer for the 64bit question says it all:
"What benefit do you hope to gain from a 64-bit version of SketchUp?"They really have no clue as to real world usage of SU have they?
Why am I using Photoshop 64 bit instead of the 32 bit version?
Why am I using 3dsmax 64 bit instead of the 32 bit version?
Why? Because of memory limitations, basically.
What is so hard to understand about that? -
@pixero said:
Why? Because of memory limitations, basically.
What is so hard to understand about that?but still, what are you going to gain from more memory?
maybe export bigger 2d images or something?[really, i don't know but i don't think the guy would be saying that as a straight coverup]
edit- but yeah, i'm sort of wondering the same thing.. what reasons would you want 64bit sketchup?
[if your answer is more memory then what do you want more memory for?] -
@unknownuser said:
but still, what are you going to gain from more memory?
maybe export bigger 2d images or something?Use SU for real projects and not just low poly Google Earth stuff.
Seriously, rendering with for example Vray inside SU would be a whole different thing.
Exporting larger 2d images and animations another. I'm constantly reaching the SU limits and have to export smaller images than I wish due to SU running out of memory.
As I wrote: Why am I using 3dsmax 64bit instead of 32 bit? -
@pixero said:
Use SU for real projects and not just low poly Google Earth stuff.
well, at least you got me all figured out..
@unknownuser said:
Seriously, rendering with for example Vray inside SU would be a whole different thing.
Exporting larger 2d images and animations another. I'm constantly reaching the SU limits and have to export smaller images than I wish due to SU running out of memory.
As I wrote: Why am I using 3dsmax 64bit instead of 32 bit?i dunno, export your stuff on a mac if it's that important to you.. you'll get twice the size.
but i'm not really buying into it.. seriously, why on earth do i need something bigger than 10,000 px wide jpg?
there are much more important things to focus on. -
64bit offers faster computing of scientific formulas, increased memory up to some 62 gigs depending on your setup... what's more it's what most all new systems will be from now on, it's simply staying with the times. and of course I would expect multi thread support as well...
-
@unknownuser said:
i dunno, export your stuff on a mac if it's that important to you.. you'll get twice the size.
Maybe if I was a one man show but I work for a company that has strict rules for software and hardware. Mac is not allowed.
@unknownuser said:
but i'm not really buying into it.. seriously, why on earth do i need something bigger than 10,000 px wide jpg?
there are much more important things to focus on.I can very rarely export images wider than 4000 pixels. On a lucky day I might be able to get it up to 4300px. That isn't enough for our needs.
-
@krisidious said:
64bit offers faster computing of scientific formulas,
like booleans for instance?
or algorithms for the upcoming generative modeling plugin? (or some of the existing plugins needing mad calculations?)if that's true, then yeah.. 64bit sounds worth fighting for.. but then again, i don't understand why j.b. would say that.. (well unless he was being genuine in his question)
-
A real honest to goodness Linux Sketchup. I mean, why insist that we run it in Wine when usability is severely hampered. Please?
-
Hi Jan,
To my understanding, the biggest obstacle of running SU under Linux is the lack of proper video drivers supporting full OpenGL for SU. That is; it would be not mainly a SU limitation but rather Linux' fault to support the video cards' full hardware potentials.
-
@krisidious said:
64bit offers faster computing
Faster? 64bit can be slower. The data types are longer - takes more power to process. 64bit != Speed
-
@unknownuser said:
but still, what are you going to gain from more memory?
maybe export bigger 2d images or something?From pure SU use - mostly the export. But the main desire for 64bit SU would be because many people use render engines that run inside SU - and then you really do need. all the RAM you can get. But 64bit isn't a quick and easy thing to just slap on. And it might very well affect performance in a negative way. It's not a magic bullet - it has it cons.
There are however one thing that can help to some extent, which should not be a big deal to do - it's nearly free: LargeAddressAware application. If a 32bit application is LargeAddressAware it can address a full 4GB under 64bit OS. Double the amount available now.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee418798%28VS.85%29.aspx#The__LARGEADDRESSAWARE_flag@unknownuser said:
It is a good practice to specify large-address-aware when building 32-bit applications, by using the linker flag /LARGEADDRESSAWARE, even if the application is not intended for a 64-bit platform, because of the advantages that are gained at no cost. As explained earlier, enabling this flag for a build allows a 32-bit program to access more memory with special boot options on a 32-bit OS or on a 64-bit OS. However, developers must be careful that pointer assumptions are not made, such as assuming that the high-bit is never set in a 32-bit pointer. In general, enabling the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag is a good practice.
Thirty-two-bit applications that are large-address-aware can determine at run time how much total virtual address space is available to them with the current OS configuration by calling GlobalMemoryStatusEx. The ullTotalVirtual result will range from 2147352576 bytes (2 GB) to 4294836224 bytes (4 GB). Values that are larger than 3221094400 (3 GB) can only be obtained on 64-bit editions of Windows. For example, if IncreaseUserVa has a value of 2560, the result is ullTotalVirtual with a value of 2684223488 bytes.
-
Added LargeAddressAware as an idea.
-
As I read between the lines here and there the main problem with SU is it's architecture showing it's age and limitations. Somewhere I read a SketchUP developer asking if we could wait year or two for rewriting SketchUp's code.
-
I do find this obsession with 64bit depressing.
64 bit general code can often run SLOWER than 32 bit because it has to pick up twice the amount of data so hurts your i-cache.
A lot of math in 32 bit applications is performed using 128 bit operands already (SSE / Altivec). No idea where people get the idea that 64 bit is 'faster' somehow - its a misunderstanding how stuff works I guess.
Like Jeff Hammond, I struggle to understand what workflow using SU requires 2 GB of memory. I'd say your workflow needs looking at.
And lastly, you're wrong to dismiss John Bacus's comment about 64 bit. He's simply nudging you to really engage about what you hope to achieve with 64 bit because from the comments above, most SU users don't understand what 64 bit actually means. They have wholly unrealistic expectations.
The big problem - I've seen this often in the past - is where people fall into the trap when asked for feature requests, by being proscriptive about their preferred solution. We should focus on things we'd like SketchUp to be able to do and not tell the Developers how they should be realised.
Having said all that, The Google SketchUp team are rubbish at providing any visibility of future roadmaps for SketchUp to help us understand where they think its going - and take us with them.
Adam
-
@adamb said:
Like Jeff Hammond, I struggle to understand what workflow using SU requires 2 GB of memory. I'd say your workflow needs looking at.
When you export really large 2d exports that memory usage easily run up to that point - nothing to do with the workflow. But that's about the only area where SU itself run into the memory issue. Mostly it's when using render engines that run inside SU's process.
-
@adamb said:
The big problem - I've seen this often in the past - is where people fall into the trap when asked for feature requests, by being proscriptive about their preferred solution. We should focus on things we'd like SketchUp to be able to do and not tell the Developers how they should be realised.
Yup - ditto. I read multi-core support as "increased performance". But people gets fixated on reading that it should have mulit-core support to be fast - so when performance increase is provided, such as in SU7.1 - it doesn't get full credit.
Best thing we (the users) can do is request the goal - then let the engineers work out the means. -
@thomthom said:
@adamb said:
Like Jeff Hammond, I struggle to understand what workflow using SU requires 2 GB of memory. I'd say your workflow needs looking at.
When you export really large 2d exports that memory usage easily run up to that point - nothing to do with the workflow. But that's about the only area where SU itself run into the memory issue. Mostly it's when using render engines that run inside SU's process.
I don't understand. 10000 pixel * 10000 pixel * RGBA is 400MBytes. You're doing images larger than this? Mad.
EDIT: OK perhaps not Mad. But surprising.
Advertisement