First Zwift session yesterday.

So my garmin dongle and laptop arrived :slight_smile: Time to get zwifting!

I am using Garmin 510 with HR chest strap, Garmin combined speed and cadence sensor, Garmin Ant+ dongle and a Cycleops Jet fluid Pro.
My Laptop have i7 core and a Nvidia GeForce GT840M GPU, which is hooked up to an LCD 32" TV via laptop HDMI output.

Everything was so easy, i plugged everything in, loaded the game synced HR and speed/cadence sensor and it all worked seamlessly :slight_smile: Well done developers.

I spent an hour and a half going round the island with no issues at all, as far as i could tell. I am not the fittest person in the world so i took it easy around most of the island conserving energy to attack he main climb each lap. I was very impressed with how the metrics from my ant+ devices sync with the onscreen avatar and it seems like the speeds are pretty accurate on the flat and dialled down nicely for the hill.
I was so impressed that after a couple of laps, i got immersed in the game and when attacking the hill i sort of forgot i was on a trainer and kept pushing right up to the KOM flag, which is great and should really help in the real world.

I like the island loop aswell, it makes a nice training loop. For me at the moment it takes about 12 minutes to get round, which equates to 10 min spin, 2 min max effort up the hill. It will be great when more maps are added and i can have a shorter duration between hills (hard efforts), which will in effect give a different workout effort, with less recovery time. Similarly it would be great if in the future i could develop my own maps (or choose from available maps) with flat and hills at intervals that could be based on whatever specific training i am aiming for.

My only slight criticism at the moment is the boosts you get, i understand its a game and these sort of things make it a bit more exciting, especially if it helps you chase down a rival. However in he real world you dont get boosts, only hard work and effort count. I may change my mind as i play more but for now i wont be using boosts as i want a consistent lap time, hill climb etc so i can gauge how well/much i am improving.

I do have one question, does the game automatically take over my Nvidia graphics card or are there things i need to do in order to get he best graphics possible.

Thanks for any comments and replies.

Jonny Cooke

Hi Jonny,

Zwift detects which video card you have and adjusts graphics quality accordingly to maintain smooth frame-rates. We will be adding UI to allow you to customize your set-up soon (we just haven’t finished it yet).