Sketchup Pro Mac Requirements
Christa Voth
SketchUp Pro - System Requirements Like many computer programs, SketchUp requires certain hardware and software specifications in order to install and run. These are basic requirements, though, so you may want to use our recommended suggestions to...
These low-end Quadro cards are slow and practically useless - meant for 2D AutoCad work.
High-end Quadro cards are a waste of money, high-end GeForce cards are more powerful and less expensive. There is no benefit of using quadros for SketchUp.
Depends on how much you have in the budget, the better the computer, in general the better it will run SketchUp. Main learnings after using lots of combinations is try to run GTX over Quardo, no benefit really especially for the price point as @Anssi says.
My best advice after trying so many things over 10 years (and now being lucky enough that my new job has awesome computers!) Is to go for the cloud route. Have a good machine to make your model, assemble and make a medium resolution proof then send it all to the cloud for rendering.
Even on my work machine (below) I have some issues with larger files so I usually create a master template in SketchUp and then assemble a final model inside the render engine (who 9 times out of 10 handle large* models better than SketchUp).
SketchUp runs well and I can take in fairly large models of between 300-700MB. Rendering is good I can do a 10k frame (average across multiple GPU render engines) in about 1h-11h depending on its complexity. 1080HD is about 10-30mins per frame.
SketchUp runs exceptionally better, for some reason I still have issues when loading large files (+1GB) but the difference is once they have loaded they perform much quicker. Rendering times are greatly improved, as above times come down to seonds-2 mins for 1080HD.
You will get to the point however, when SketchUp is not going to get (noticeably) better without a lot of hardware upgrades. You will instead see an improvement in rendering, and then again depending on the budget you have a few options:
Most bang for the buck is using a cloud service such as Amazon or a specific rendering company and just send them the files. If you are doing serious rendering then you may want to build a render farm but you have to weigh that up against how much work you have and how quick you need to do it (also factor in cooling costs and running costs).
In work I have the machine above that lets me do still renders at 10k, animation tests at 720p and generally do all my proofing. I then have a render farm for full frame animation at 4k. If I did not have that then I would just use a cloud service.
Graphics card requirements for Enscape are serious. It is a bit beyond my ken. Who is going to make this easy for me? I have AMD 15DD Graphics card and Enscape says it's out of date. Trying to use the graphics card update Enscape recommmends for 3.2.0 didn't work either, I guess because my existing graphics card is so meager. But my computer guy says what I need is simply a bigger video card, because mine only has 1 GB ram (or vram?), and that is what he plans to get for me. But he says it's takes a long time to get video cards because everything is slowed down because of pandemic. Reading these comments here and anywhere about graphics card requirements for Enscape is like reading Greek. Have never had to get this involved in graphics cards. Takes a certain level of expertise. Wish Enscape could make it easier. I have HP desktop and windows 10.
Indeed, if your graphics card only has 1GB of VRAM (Graphics card memory), then you will not be able to run Enscape - You will have to acquire a GPU with at least 4GB of VRAM, ideally more. I also understand the situation is dire lately when it comes to more modern GPUs which cannot be acquired at the moment, or only for insane prices.
Besides that, if the GPU is suitable for Enscape, most of the time the rest of your machine would suffice, especially if you're able to use Revit, SketchUp, Rhino or ArchiCAD without Enscape, without any performance problems.
In this case, I recommend you further refer to your system admin, to perhaps look for a good deal on a used GPU, or you're going to be lucky and get one new for a decent price. Which may be unlikely for a couple more months at least.
The previous generation is the 20 series, I have a 2070 that has 8Gb of vram and its working well for my needs, you/your computer guy could look for a second hand 20 series though as Demian pointed out the market is nasty at the moment with ridiculous prices for anything out there.
I had no idea it (Enscape) would be this difficult and expensive! I don't know anything about graphics cards, even though I'm quite proficient with SketchUp, Vray and Corona Render (which I use with Cinema4D and SketchUp). This is a whole new thing. I used all of those programs on my two or three year old HP Pavillion Desktop 590-P0024 computer (with the AMD15DD graphics card) with no problem except I added some ram. I don't even know what to shop for. What would I be shopping for? How would I describe what I need? Thank you.
I have another question. Is there a chance, if I do get the proper graphics card, that I will be able to run Enscape on my 2017 version of Sketchup? Your specifications say only 2018 and up (but I guess you mean Sketchup Pro; don't think they refer to their versions with year numbers anymore) but when I tried to open my trial Enscape plug in, the only message was about my graphics card, so I was hoping maybe it would work in my 2017 version. Thank you.
It really only is difficult and complicated at first - Once you've wrapped your head around the current GPU models available, there really are not that many which we would really recommend. You can of course also always refer to our system requirements just to see which GPU's we list. I'm not sure what you mean by "what would I be shopping for", are you referring to the GPU now or other PC components? This is also usually where the system administrator comes into play which should be able to clear a few things up and give you perhaps a brief introduction into which PC components are important for 3D rendering (Which Enscape does) and such, but any further questions can also be directed at me/us of course!
SketchUp 2017 is not officially supported I'm afraid. Even if it may work under some circumstances still, you'll usually run into issues sooner than later. In this case, we recommend upgrading to SketchUp 2018 or above.
NoMasCorona , we do not censor anything in this Forum and never have, never will, and never could unless it really is spam or something insulting to us or the community - Every new user has a period of a day in which their posts get approved manually by the Enscape team to simply avoid incoming spam (because many users come into the Forum posting something normal, only to then replace their message with ads/spam afterward), which was a problem before I've added this rule. Pardon the confusion, but you're neither disabled nor censored here.
Thank you very much Demian. When I saw "disabled" on my posts it reminded me of twitter and I jumped to a conclusion. I have appreciated your replies very much, right from the very first one. In terms of "what I would ask for," if I went shopping for a new computer now, I guess I understand now the words I need are a 'dedicated/discreet VRAM of at least 4GB.' I guess I have to get my head around how much I would have to spend (on a big VRAM and probably SketchUp) just to get started with the Enscape trial. I guess there is no way around that. Thx.
If you do wish to go shopping for a new machine entirely, which is probably recommended since your current one may have other components that drag the graphics card (which is MOST important for Enscape) down in terms of performance:
What you want to ask for is a machine with a Graphics Card that has at least 4GB of VRAM, ideally though 8GB+ is what we truly recommend. If there is a chance for you to let me know what kind of machines or Graphics Cards in those machines specifically are available for purchase, please simply let me know here and I'll gladly get back to you with further info regarding which GPU (Graphics Card) would be suited the most!
Not to confuse you any further, but, it's rather simple when it comes to the Graphics Cards at least from the manufacturer NVIDIA (there really only are two large companies producing them, AMD and NVIDIA and we usually recommend NVIDIA cards):
Have a look at this graph above (source), and you will see that it's mostly 3xxx and 2xxx cards listed there alongside some Quadros or Titans. The Titan cards are usually very, very expensive and mostly not worth the price (in my opinion) while the Quadro cards are also a lot more expensive compared to their counterpart non-Quadro cards (You pay a lot extra for Quadros since they're rather used for applications with complex calculations and NVIDIA offers more advanced support for them, neither is needed for Enscape pretty much).
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