New Workout, new FPS drops. This time I didn’t trigger the workout pain effect, but the fps dropped significantly on a few occasions. Not really tied to turns popping up but experienced it there as well.
Another ride, this time with massive drops. The heaviest drop was with workout pain effect while approaching Italian Village Junction.
I wonder if it is a compound issue, if you have one of group coming towards you, turning coming up, pain effect etc you might be ok but two or three at the same time and it is terrible.
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I’m coming to the same conclusion (see other thread).
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Well it wasn’t an issue until v1.25 
It probably was… (see logs above). Like many things recently though, it seems to have gone backwards.
I’ve had big FPS drops when doing workouts for years and and have reported it before, I’ve asked others if they had similar issues but didn’t find anyone else.
I don’t know about these new reports but my FPS drops start at exactly 8 minutes on Watopia and drop every time I hit an arch, when in Makuri they start at 4 minutes and drop every 5 mins or sometimes when hitting an arch. Once the workout is done my FPS is solid again.
It’s bizarre and been like that for ages, I’ve reinstalled Windows 10, Zwift, etc, still the same.
Only happens in workouts and I’ve never used the Workout Pain effect.
This time it was really bad. Had hard drops while looping around Jungle Loop, but the drops where not related to any turns or workout pain effect.
Had another two workouts, but this time it was a bit different. The first workout just had one step and during the whole hour I didnt encounter any fps drops. But 2min. before the end, just as the workout arch got rendered and displayed on screen, my fps dropped hard below the 40fps mark.
Same was for todays workout. This time, more steps where included but no fps drop encounterend, except for the last Arch which showed the same behavior as before.
This is why I suggested a cache problem, it’s as though some stuff causes a drop as your system frantically compiles them like they’re the first time you’ve ever seen them, but others do not as they are pulled from storage.
Maybe, yes.
@shooj Today I did another workout and it’s definitely the workout arch that’s causing the hard fps drops. As soon as the arch is rendered on the map and world (2min. before riding through) FPS dropped really bad. Once you ride through, fps quickly recovers.
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As suspected this may be showing up most in workouts for some, but it’s a wider problem with ridiculous spikes in CPU load as per the other threads. Here’s a one hour group ride around Makuri on the Wandering Flats route. Same number of riders in the group throughout (roughly 20). We completed about 1.5ish laps, so covered the same part of Neokyo twice.
Why then did the frame rate go from a solid 95fps (vsync capped) to tanking like mad on the second visit to Neokyo? No reason at all for this to happen.
Oh and it was doing the stuttering throughout, irrespective of the frame rate.
Same here today, workout in Neokyo. The low fps seems to reset back to normal when passing through a banner or end of an interval, then gets bad again. Can see rough correlation between intervals and framerate drops.
I got the second fastest to fastest gaming CPU + a 3080Ti now (also because of all the issues with AMD cards) and still having significant frame drops in workouts… this is really ridiculous.
I rode on for ten minutes after the workout, where no more drops happened… played with vsync enabled.
Not at Zwift though, it’s quite a long way behind my i3. 
But yeah, same crap. You need to enable triple buffering to prevent those drops being all the way to 30fps though.
Yeah but why are those drops happening when a workout changes to another segment? Thats just weird. But as someone mentioned it seems to bei related to the arches.
It definitely is the workout arch beeing rendered and/or some code around it. Please check with your workout, the arch gets rendered 2 minutes before the segment ends, thats when the drops are usually starting to happen. Once passing through the arch and the next segment is more than 2min. long, fps recovers but only to drop again when the next segment hits the 2min before end mark again.
My workout today showed exactly this behavior.
It’s still there in v1.26.1. My fps dropped so hard that my TV started flickering as hell because VRR couldn’t handle the drops below 30fps.
Every dip was a workout arch, Did 30/15sec Intervalls and fps didn’t recover during this. Then came a longer rest phase and right before they end, thats where the hard drops occured.
Here is a workout which just had one step. As you can see, 2mins before the workout ended, fps dropped hard to the 30’s.
Just an idea:
The Zwift game engine got a overhaul regarding things to render: Based on Obvervations the game engine seems to have changed from a spherical rendering around the rider to a conical POV rendering, so basically everything thats not in the riders POV gets not rendered/ignored. Thats why there are fps fluctuations when changing camera view forth and back etc.
So: If the arch lies outside this conical POV and has to appear in-game 2min before actually riding through it, maybe this triggers the game engine to render basically everything in that direction and causing this hard fps drop.
Sounds logical to me at least … 
But one can only assume how the engine works … 
I reckon it’s because the workout arches aren’t ‘meant’ to be in the world, so the game craps itself. It’s a prolonged performance dip (rather than a very brief stutter) because the arches are placed randomly and are constantly recalculating and/or moving based on how your workout is going. Then when you pass under, they disappear and everything is ‘normal’ again… until the next one is generated. It’s certainly not that they’re difficult to render and require significant resources, more that it’s an unexpected asset in the pipeline.
Hopefully it can be rectified.