I’m riding Zwift since 3 weeks now an I love it. Great fun.
As I use a gaming laptop as the client machine the graphics are a litte like in the mid-2000s. This could be better I can imagine. With the wide support of Devices runing from phones to real PCs i can understand that the graphics should be fine for alle devices and big textures are not good for this.
So: Why not provide a HD texture package for Windows clients? Like the ones for Fallout 4 for example. So everyone with a proper machine can choose to install them.
From the dev side I can imagine that the team is currently improving the network and serverside to handle all the new Zwifters properly and to keep the system running as smooth as it did. And this should be the main task.
What graphics chip do you have in your laptop? Zwift has very good graphics if you have a powerful enough graphics chip/card. If you go into the game settings and look at your graphics detail options you will see whatever your chip can handle as Zwift auto-detects your chip and only offers what will run reasonably smoothly.
My old (but extremely powerful for its day) laptop with an Nvidia 550M chip couldn’t manage anything over the basic 1080p setting, but my Alienware Alpha2 PC with an Nvidia 960 chip can easily run the high detail 4k setting and it looks fantastic.
If you are wondering how your laptop compares to others go to www.zwiftalizer.com and upload your game logs to see what it thinks. My laptop rates a 5/10 and my Alienware rates a 10/10.
Zwift runs on an Alienware 15r2 with a Nvidia 970m GTX, should have enough power. And yes the Ultra setting is ok, but far from what is nowadays state of the art. I’m in playing computer games for 30 years now and love great graphics.
I did not expect impressiv graphics like in Sone of Rome or GTA V, but it could done better with little efford in some bumpmapping and stuff like this. Especially in the city courses it would be great to have more “realistic” buildings. World of Tanks is a nice exapmle for the graphic improvements by adding better textures. They added nice textures and the games looks times better than before. Ok they improved the 3D engine aswell, but hey…
But do not get it wrong please, I like the look of the game and the current graphics. THe snow, rain, vulcano, the sunrises when near the radio station in the mountains. All looks nice. And I really enjoy riding along, so no need to watch a movie for me.
For some totaly unknown reason teh zwiftalizer side does not work, could not connect to them due to timeouts. Strange thing.
And yes the Ultra setting is ok, but far from what is nowadays state of the art. I’m in playing computer games for 30 years now and love great graphics.