Laptop brought to its knees

jalsina

Just moved a model onto my laptop to show to a potential client, and brought the poor thing to its knees - really slow jerky movement rendering. I can almost hear it moaining and groaning. And this is by no means a big or highly detailed model. Looks like it's time for a new laptop. What are the general requirements for a laptop that won't run out of steam as I get more advanced? Thx.

Gaieus

There are two things that you need to keep in mind:

SU is a single core application so if you buy something new, do not go for as many CPU cores as you can but as big clock speed (by individual cores) as possible (this could of course be done by overclocking with some more modern, multicore CPU's).
Get a decent (but not necessarily high-end) video card that fully supports OpenGL and stay away from integrated video chipsets.
All the rest is just the garnishing. The only memory intensive operation in SU is image export so if you need to export really high resolution images, get a 64 bit OS (as SU 8 M1 is now "large address aware) and as much memory as you think is sufficient (in this case SU could use up to 4 Gb and then you need some for the OS and other background processes).

jalsina

Gaius, My laptop runs at 2.1 GHZ, has 4 GB main DDR2 memory, over 200GB free disk space, and is running Windows 7 x64. Is it normal for it to bog down so badly when navigating, or perhaps something is not set up right for Sketchup?

Gaieus

2.1 GHz is not much at all. Also, check what video card you have as on lappies those may be the main suspect (since they are small, they are often integrated into the motherboard and that's what makes them crap for this kind of work).

solo

Integrated or dedicated GPU?

jalsina

Graphics is Intel GMA 4500MHD (integrated).

HFM

I've had SU turn of the 'hardware acceleration' sometimes for some reason, you might want to check that.

Anssi

@jalsina said:

Graphics is Intel GMA 4500MHD (integrated).

Whatever Intel might say about its graphics chips, they are not OpenGL compatible, and do not run SketchUp with OpenGL Hardware Acceleration on. They are slow because they share the memory with the CPU.

Anssi

Gaieus

So that seems to be the culprit then. If you are for a new laptop, take extra care not even to listen to the salesman when he is trying to convince you about integrated chips.