Sketchup Vidio Card

[Scott C. Williams]

Google sketchup recommends a 3D class vidio card with a minimum of 256 MB of memory. Also that the vidio card driver supports OpenGL version 1.5 or higher.

I am updating our desk top and find these vidio recommendations to be expensive.

My question is what are you Sketchup users (free version of version 7) have for or recommend for vidio requirements? I am not a computer whiz so please make it simple.

Thanks

[Ed Sallee]

Sounds like a good idea. I have a good video card at home on my home computer, but the computer at work does not.

Any time I use sketchup on my work computer, especially using the protractor feature - my whole system will freeze up.

That is due to not enough memory in the video card.

Not sure if I answered your question - but, I do understand the recommendation.

[Jerome Hanby]

There should be some good values on the used market for those video cards. The hottest video should be dual pci/16 cards using ATI Crossfire or whatever competing "standard" nVideo has. Folks don't usually come from a vacuum into that kind of video, so stuff they upgraded out of should be on the market.

Another upgrade path is to move from a smaller video "aperture" (say 64 bit) to a larger one (like 256 bit). Those smaller cards should be plenty fast for cad/cam stuff...

An ATI agp/256K 9200 knockoff runs about $31. An ATI 9800 knockoff, RADEON 9800 256MB DDR AGP runs about $100.

Google pricewatch and use them to find good prices.

[John Schreiber]

I run a four year old Dell with only the on-board video (no separate card). It does bog down on really big projects, but I've never had trouble with any woodworking plans.

I'd try it without first, then perhaps try an inexpensive video card. If you turn off textures and shadows, SU isn't too demanding.

[Jim German]

There should be some good values on the used market for those video cards. The hottest video should be dual pci/16 cards using ATI Crossfire or whatever competing "standard" nVideo has. Folks don't usually come from a vacuum into that kind of video, so stuff they upgraded out of should be on the market.

Another upgrade path is to move from a smaller video "aperture" (say 64 bit) to a larger one (like 256 bit). Those smaller cards should be plenty fast for cad/cam stuff...

An ATI agp/256K 9200 knockoff runs about $31. An ATI 9800 knockoff, RADEON 9800 256MB DDR AGP runs about $100.

Google pricewatch and use them to find good prices.

Umm, I don't mean to insult you, but pretty much everything you said there is wrong. PCIe is the current standard for video cards, getting a dual card solution (what AMD/ATI calls Crossfire, and Nvidia calls SLI) isn't generaly cost effective and would be way overkill for something like sketchup. I'm not really sure what you're talking about aperture... One thing to keep in mind however is that video card performance is very difficult to measure, and the manufactures to a very poor job naming and describing their products. The only real way to tell which card is better is by looking at 3rd-party benchmarks. The amount of memory that a video card has is also a very poor gauge of how good the card is, but its better than nothing.

A used video card isn't really going to be worth the money due to their relatively short lifespan, and how quickly the technology changes. Google Sketchup doesn't require a very fast video card. Any new $50 card from Newegg is most likely going to be just fine. Also any configuration from a major manufactur that has a discrete video card should work jsut fine. If you want a particular recommendation, post or shoot me a pm with what you're looking at.


Lastly, Ed, your freezeups, partiuclarly if they come from using the protractor feature, are most likely do to not enough system memory, not video card memory.

[alex grams]

oddly enough, my work laptop runs sketchup better than my home computer, which has a gtx280 and is a top of the line video card. I can't figure that one out.

[John Schreiber]

I don't really understand why, but I have been told that for SU, the main processor and main memory handle the model's geometry and that a video card handles the textures, shadows etc. What that means is that if you can do most of your SU work with textures, shadows, etc turned off, the video card doesn't matter much. If you are producing finished presentation drawings with many complex textures etc, then a powerful video card makes a difference.

If anyone can explain why that would be true, I'd love to hear it.

[Scott C. Williams]

I am just getting to know SU thru the tutorials.

I haven't had a problem with our laptop which has a ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 chipset. The laptop is a cheapie, Acer Aspire 5100 AMD Athon 64X2 duel core processer, 1.70 GHZ, 1790 MB ram, 32 Bit operating system.

I am only interested in using SU for furniture design. From the info I am receiving it appears that if I don't get into shading etc, but keep it simple I should be OK with a system not geared to high end graphics.

Further note: Dell quoted a system with vidio requiements (NVIDIA Series) per Sketchup $599. This was not the total for the system only for the vidio card.

[Stephen Tashiro]

The type of video card you can use will be limited by the motherboard in your computer. Most modern motherboards can use PCI or PCI-E cards. Older machines have built-in slots for AGP or AGP-2 type cards. The Crossfire and PC-SLI cards require special slots. So first determine what the motherboard can handle.

[Blake Barr]

Basically don't worry about it... any modern, even built in video cards will work fine for sketch-up.... unless you're modeling cities or something crazy...

[Thomas Bank]

unless you're modeling cities or something crazy...

It is one of those things that until you've experienced better, you sort of don't know what you are missing. A fair amount (a few gigs) of memory and a good video card makes SketchUp a much nicer program to play with.

Heck, more memory makes a lot of things work much better than a lot of people know. As soon as you use up available memory and start using virtual memory, your computer is only as fast as your hard drive. And if you don't have contiguous space on the drive for swap files, you can really slow things down.

[Mike OMelia]

Umm, I don't mean to insult you, but pretty much everything you said there is wrong. PCIe is the current standard for video cards, getting a dual card solution (what AMD/ATI calls Crossfire, and Nvidia calls SLI) .

I was wondering about that PCI recommendation as well. PCI Express is the way to go. Of course, your motherboard needs to support it! All the new ones do. I think by "aperture" the poster is referring to how video cards can capture some motherboard memory for its own use (look in the bios and you will see an aperture setting).

I will say this. Anything by nVidia, 9800 or greater is more than you will need. 9800s are very affordable. But be careful. Performance video cards can put a big drain on the power supply. Video cards (in the affordable range) can soak 100-200 watts!

Really, without knowing your system, motherboard configuration, and power supply, its about impossible to make a recommendation.

Mike (I am partial to nVidia... they have set the standards now with releasing the CUDA s/w API, and it looks like ATI will follow them)

[Anthony Whitesell]

I know I still back in the stone age running SU v6. I have 1.7GHz with 768MB Ram and a NVDIVIA GeForce FX 5200 video card and have done some serious modelling with it and no hiccups at all. Does anyone know the difference in the requirements between SU v6 and SU v7.

One of the better ways to know if you need more system memory is, first, restart the machine and as soon as possible, without starting any applications, view the memory in use in the task manager. Second, start sketchup and load your file and view the memory in use in the task manager again. If the memory in use exceeds the actual memory in the computer; then you need more or need to kill off some of the vampire programs running in the background.

[glenn bradley]

My old PC was basically unusable with SU. The screen would stall, moves were erratic and group selections would throw the cursor somewhere a mile from the objects I was after. Sometimes the whole machine would lock up.

The loaner machine I am running now is a midpoint HP with 2gig or ram and an Nvidia GE force or some such. I think it was well under $800 new. The previous rig was so underpowered and under memory'd that a fair comparison can't be made but, if SU or other rotational graphics are important to you, don't go cheap.

[Jerome Hanby]

Forgive me for omitting the lower case "e" after PCI, the "/16" for 16 lanes only makes sense if you are talking about PCI Express video cards. Other than that single letter, everything I posted was spot on.

If by lifespan, you are talking about the MTBF, don't be insulted, but you would be totally wrong. Power supplies and drives of all types fail much more frequently than video cards. I will stipulate that the case itself usually has a longer lifespan than the video card, but other than that the video card, motherboard including CPU, and actual RAM are all about tied. If you are talking about their usable lifespan before they are obsolete, then it seems you are contradicting yourself when you state that Google SketchUp doesn't require a very fast video card.

Used cards not being worth it might be your opinion, but in reality it all depends on the situation. With a little asking around, it's not that hard to get one for free or in trade for your old one. Basically having one "old" video card in your junk box is not very different from having any other "old" video card in your junk box. The only time it will ever get called into service is when your PC goes south and you start swapping parts to find the problem (for what it's worth, I've seen exactly two bad video cards over the years. One was an overclocked ATI 9800XT with which I was playing, the other a Sapphire X1600 that failed during the first month it was in service, it's twin (was playing with ATI Crossfire) has been running fine virtually 24/7 for years) . I've given away and traded off over a dozen video cards over the years. Once you have a PC for every member of the family and a Linux box or three setup there is no need to keep stuff you've replaced/upgraded.

The first link that Google pops up if you search for "video card aperture" explains it fully. You'd also see that it's associated with AGP. Might be useful information since I don't know what kind of slot Scott has for video.

Not sure how much of my post you actually read or comprehended, but I was speaking of the kinds of upgrades "power" users make. They are pretty likely to be upgrading from video that was top of the line when they did their previous upgrade. That older hardware may not be all that exciting for playing the latest/greatest video games but it should be a major upgrade to what the typical PC user currently has in their machine.

Your comment about ram was helpful. Throwing memory at a problem on a Windows box usually gets you the most bang for your buck. Just make sure you aren't adding memory that Windows can't address. I'd have to check to be positive, but I think XP tops out at 3GB. Not sure about XP64 or Vista, I'd bet it can address more.


Umm, I don't mean to insult you, but pretty much everything you said there is wrong. PCIe is the current standard for video cards, getting a dual card solution (what AMD/ATI calls Crossfire, and Nvidia calls SLI) isn't generaly cost effective and would be way overkill for something like sketchup. I'm not really sure what you're talking about aperture... One thing to keep in mind however is that video card performance is very difficult to measure, and the manufactures to a very poor job naming and describing their products. The only real way to tell which card is better is by looking at 3rd-party benchmarks. The amount of memory that a video card has is also a very poor gauge of how good the card is, but its better than nothing.

A used video card isn't really going to be worth the money due to their relatively short lifespan, and how quickly the technology changes. Google Sketchup doesn't require a very fast video card. Any new $50 card from Newegg is most likely going to be just fine. Also any configuration from a major manufactur that has a discrete video card should work jsut fine. If you want a particular recommendation, post or shoot me a pm with what you're looking at.


Lastly, Ed, your freezeups, partiuclarly if they come from using the protractor feature, are most likely do to not enough system memory, not video card memory.

[Jim German]

Jerome, I apologize, my intention was not to insult you, but rather to clear up some confusion generated by your post. Keep in mind however that we're not talking about running Crysis on a 30" monitor here.

Making relatively simple models in Sketchup is not demanding on a new computer. I'd be willing to bet that any new desktop bought today isn't going to have a problem with Sketchup, and probably most laptops won't either. (netbooks are another story though).

Upgrading an old computer is always a dicey situation. There is no one size fits all anwser, although frequently you're better off just getting a new computer. There are time swhen upgrading makes sense, but exaclty what upgrades to make is really more of a case by case anwser. I suspect Scott has already made up his mind as to what he's doing, but if not post everythign you know about your computer (particualrly the processor model, the amount of ram, the video card model, the age of the computer, the brand, the OS, and if you know it, what type of ram, and video card interface it has) and we can make a suggestion.

Ohh, and 32-bit Windows has an approx 3 GB limit for ram, 64 bit varies by the specific OS, but is generaly much higher (128GB for XP64, 8GB for Vista-64 Basic, 16GB for Vista-64 Home Preimum, and 128GB for Vista-64 Buis/Ultimate.)

Lastly, I acutlaly jsut bought a dirt cheap $350 laptop, I suspect it will run sketchup just fine, but when it arrives I'll give it a shot and psot the results.