Apple hardware setup for SketchUp 3D 2020
-
Hi,
I support a company who’s designer produces large SketchUp 3D models. Their current 2019 iMac (non-pro) i5 with 32GB of RAM is proving to be inadequate when editing.
The designer has provided me with some screen grabs of a typical model that she works on:
The SketchUp file sizes for those models averages 525 Mb.
She commented “ideally I would have had both of these floors in the same model but have to split”
This leads me to believe she’s simply trying to edit with too many layers / objects enabled (even with the floors split!).I have received some great advice from other forums & Reddit with regards to limiting the amount of layers / objects that are enabled whilst editing, including using plugins such as FredoGhost.
The designer needs a new Mac regardless (as they have a new designer joining) so they'd like me to spec-up some optimal hardware for the job. Their budget is about £10k (which has to include 2 colour accurate monitors) so I was thinking an iMac Pro + an external monitor.
Considering the kind of models shown above; if you were buying an imac Pro - how would you divide your spend in terms of CPU, RAM & Graphics?
Thanks in advance for any advice & please excuse my ignorance
-
In general faster CPUs and GPUs with more RAM will be helpful. I expect you can't go wrong with higher specs.
Based on what I see from other users with very large files, I'd guess that your designer could very likely do some things to help her situation in the way of purging unused content and cleaning the model. If she's using components from the 3D Warehouse many of them can probably stand to have some simplification done to help improve performance. There are probably some textures that are larger than is useful in the model, too.
As you mention the use of layers/tags to control visibility of objects while modeling can be a big help. Better performance can also be achieved by working with textures turned off and using a "fast" style.
In a nutshell, a better computer can help but also she should make sure she is utilizing efficient modeling techniques and maintaining control over her models.
-
I general I agree with @DaveR that one should reach for the highest their budget will support. But Apple stuff gets expensive quickly, so unless the budget is unlimited there will be tradeoffs required. Below are my thoughts., purely my own opinion.
Looking over the options available for an iMac Pro, I find:
-
CPU: Intel Xeon W 8-core base vs 10-, 14-, 18-core options.
More cores are of no benefit to SketchUp. It will use just one no matter how many you have. You need to compare the single-core performance for each of the choices. I don't have time to do the research for you, but there are web sites that post CPU benchmark results. Don't be misled by the stated clock speeds or "turbo burst" speeds - often the internal details of the CPU can make it actually faster even at a lower clock speed. However, for current-generation CPUs don't expect huge differences - you might be looking at 10-15% or even less. Noticeable but not night-vs-day.
If you will also do rendering, that is a different story. Most renderers will use multiple cores and the render time will decrease about in proportion to the number of cores available. -
GPU: Radeon Pro Vega 56 base vs 64 or 64X options
Most of the difference between these won't be very noticeable in SketchUp because its graphics speed is limited by the communication between the CPU and the GPU more than by the raw power of the GPU itself. My only thought is that because they have 16GB of video RAM vs 8 in the Vega 56, the Vega 64 or 64x might be better able to manage multiple external displays. But I don't have any experience to back that up. -
System RAM: 32GB base vs 64, 128, or 256 options
Apple memory tends to be comparatively expensive. IMHO you are not likely to see any difference between the base 32GB and the larger amounts unless you tend to run other memory-hogs at the same time as SketchUp. Even models of the sort you describe won't exhaust 32GB by themselves. -
SSD: 1TB base vs 2TB, 4TB options
IMHO there has been too much emphasis on gigantic storage media lately, driven largely by non-business users who accumulate many thousands of images and music files.
This really comes down to the question of how much stuff you will need to have live on the computer at the same time, which in turn depends on your preferred workstyle. It is always possible to copy old work off the computer onto an external drive if you don't need it continuously accessible. Even with incremental copies, LayOut files, rendered images, exported PDFs, reference files, etc. it is hard to imagine a SketchUp project that would need more than a few GB of space. So, taking an extreme example, if a project needed 10GB of space, you could fit almost 100 of them onto a 1TB disk. It's not likely that you will create 100 projects of that scale in the lifetime of a single computer!
-
-
Thank you kindly DaveR and slbaumgartner for the detailed replies, very much appreciated
Regards
Al
Advertisement