Number 1 - you should upgrade graphics for android and apple tablets, phones. We have better and better equipment nowadays but graphics is falling behind.
Number 2 - you should change categories a bit. I am mostly talking about group B and A
I think group B should be split to B(3,2-3,7 w/kg) and B+(3,8-4,4 w/kg) and group A should start from 4,5 w/kg.It is quite easy now, if you are between categories, to be trapped in group A, while you are still not quite there.
Fellow riders and Zwift support what do you think about this idea.
I think the issue here is that tablets, generally, donāt have enough processing power to render the graphics at a higher resolution without creating lags, which people would likely gripe about more than the graphics quality. There might be some tablets in each range that could handle it, but not all - or even enough - so Zwift hasnāt addressed it.
Or alternatively you have what one of the Sydney based IRL cycling clubs used to call ācoffee shop A gradeā (aka the not serious A grade and what they considered real A grade? That was pretty nasty of them.
You could split up A grade because seeing the discussions, people from B get upgraded then have a very hard time and some lose motivation. Have an A1 and A2.
Then that might also make B a bit better.
As long as there are enough people to fill the races.
for number 2 they should have gone back to the old zwiftpower categories and just enabled pen enforcement to stop people entering lower categories, that was all that was asked for at the time but they gave us CE which is worse now than before especially after they changed all the limits and a fair chunk of low A riders ended up in B blowing races apart due to the size of the wkg different between the low end and top end
The power of GPUs on laptops and to an even greater extent mobile devices is severely constrained by space and even more importantly cooling. Thereās a reason why GPU cards come with 2 or 3 large fans and many hard-core users add even more cooling above that on the card. Even an old 1070 or 2070 is way more powerful than even the latest tablet/phone GPU,
The problem with splitting A category is that events with 4 As will then have 2 in each starting pen. The upper one may have only people with faulty equipment (maybe not a bad thing?). Pens should be completely customized by organizers, and more than 5 pens should be used, perhaps automatically, when the field is big enough to allow it. It would also help if pens were completely divorced from categories (eg, call them pen 1,2,3,4,5,6, etc so people donāt associate their category with their pen, or just do away with categories entirely)
Zwift isnāt like most other 3D games though, in that itās mainly CPU-limited (and a single core at that) rather than farming out most of its work to a big GPU.
So your comparison works for most games, but not Zwift. Which is why on a PC a decent CPU and a relatively elderly GPU can produce very detailed graphics.
My response was to āThere are high-end tablets which have more power than most PCsā. The same constraints that limit GPUs do also, to a slightly lesser extent, limit mobile device CPUs so a cheap desktop will still be as good or better at running Zwift than a top end expensive mobile device. At least with Zwift being CPU bound, mobile users still get reasonable performance without overheating.
portable devices have different user requirements, they need to consider battery life and economy too. smaller, more powerful, more efficient, pick 3, and it will happen eventually with time, but zwift is already optimised far better for apple/android use than it is for windows as it is. i canāt even get a stable 95fps on an rtx 4070 and a 12700f right now, let alone the 144fps my 144hz monitor should be displaying
Yeah but limiting Zwift to 30fps on a. M2 iPad with a monstrously fast CPU is clearly drastically under-utilising the capabilities of the hardware. It could do, say, 60fps without breaking a sweat.
(Note, I donāt have an iPad, let alone an M iPad)
i get your pointā¦ zwift have to create manual profiles for each PC gpu (i mean, i dont know if they āhaveā to, but thatās how it works sort of), which leads to situations like modern powerful AMD/intel cards still being on the basic profile, since zhq never created one for them due to them being kinda niche as nvidia have a huge share of the desktop gpu market. you see those threads in the bug report section sometimes. i donāt know how it goes with apple/mobile stuff, whether a graphics settings profile can be manually or automatically created to differentiate an M3 pro from an ipod touch or what
but with that said, something like an apple tv is never gonna look any better than it already does, with the hardware it currently has.
That was my thought with splitting up A grade into two.
Must be a way to do it and I expect the fields might have more on them because the lower A riders might be more inclined to go A instead if B.
And then they donāt rip B apart, meaning B is a bit happier.
Yes, I had to ask to get profiles done for W6800X Radeon (32gb) and the W6800X Duo (dual GPUs and 64GB). It would be a lot simpler if people on PC and Mac had full control of their own graphics settings as done in other games.
On the note of graphics, Apple Vision Pro is available and other PC VR headsets are around, Iād love to see a VR option for Zwift. I remember this was tested but not released. It would be great for those Zone 2 rides.