Using Swift with my six years old laptop, graphics performance isn’t great but acceptable (6fps) until I found myself in a group of about 30 virtual riders. I was trying to draft along but the graphics deteriorated horribly. The whole picture because jerky and impossible to follow. Why should graphics performance degrade when you are riding in a virtual group?
Does your six year old laptop meet the minimum requirements as listed on the Zwift web site.
Yes just barely. No where close to recommended settings.
Graphics performance in a large group will degrade because now in addition to rendering the landscape you are rendering your fellow riders.
I don’t know why a bunch of riders should be so much more complicated than the landscape details. But it is. And the whole thing became so jerky and corrupted that I couldn’t continue with the group riding thing. This needs to be addressed.
It’s because the graphics are rendered in polygons, not raster. The more objects on the screen, the more polygons need to be rendered, even if 100 of them are overlapping.
Now… Does your old laptop have onboard video or a dedicated video card? If it’s dedicated you might want to upgrade your video card. Failing that upgrading your RAM might help, but only if you haven’t surpassed the abilities of the motherboard.
Seems Zwift recommends an Alienware desktop… Which is an insane amount of power for such a low-res “game”.