It’s been 7 years since Zwift first launched as a paid product and ever since that launch date there has been a limit of 100 riders visible on screen at once.
I really noticed this last night in the Zwift Insider Tiny Races where fields were around 130 people and sitting at the back of the pack, minding my own business, there was a lot of popping in and out of avatars as the 100 rider limit was working overtime.
Back in 2015 a top of the line gaming PC would be an i7 6700k CPU with an Nvidia GTX 960 GPU.
With the advances in computer tech in the last 7 years perhaps Zwift could handle putting 200 users on screen at once now?
It would solve the rider popping in and out issue for races with between 100 and 200 riders and for events with more than 200 (such as the fondos and the big tours coming up which can easily attract over 1000 riders) it might improve the user experience being able to see those extra 100 riders further ahead.
If Zwift is concerned about performance they could make this a user option with a choice between 100 and 200 riders visible.
The 100 rider limit actually came in 2020 when lockdown numbers meant things went a bit crazy.
Normally I’d suggest some some of scaling based on capability, but in this case I would say it should stay the same as it is, until they get their act together for system performance with only 100 riders. Running a 12th gen cpu and 3060ti, and in Makuri I can’t maintain 60fps which is mental.
I think the 100 rider limit came in during the pandemic Zwift boom. I remember doing a tour event where my laptop struggled to cope with thousands of riders on screen so all I had were riderless bikes.
As Kevs says, I remember a TdZ when it was trying to draw thousands of riders and you ended up with them crashing all over the place. Or maybe visually you could only see 100 at a time, but the change they made was to ignore more than 100 for the purpose of calculating positions.
As I remember it, it wasn’t really trying to draw thousands of riders (not that you could tell the difference) but rather struggling to figure out which 100 out of those thousands to draw. In this classic you can see it at its worst, but you can also see it’s not showing more than the 100 riders in the start pen either:
That’s it, and what they changed/improved in 2020 as I recall. Go back to videos and streams of big rides from prior years and you can see the same 100 rider render limit. It’s always been like that IIRC.
By the way, I noticed first now that even the elapsed time clock slows down in that video and it takes forever in real time for the avatar to even get on to the main road, so I guess the position of the avatar as shown on screen matches the position of the avatar at that point in time, which is probably more than a minute behind real time (and actual position) where he gives up. Sounds like some interesting design choices in there somewhere to me (but at least these have been more or less remedied since then)…
I’d argue in group rides, it’s actually worse when doing sweeps, when you don’t even realize people are dropping… because they aren’t being drawn!
Absolutely want to see this limit taken away, or at least give us the option if it’s too time intensive to figure out what’s an optimal number.
LODs are likely good enough already, I don’t see why this can’t be an option.
I ran into a video on youtube of Zwift from '18 and it had the 100 person limit; I think it’s been a thing since the very early days; probably was just an easy performance fix.
And has since been forgotten about.
This was when the limit was introduced as too many riders showing on a TdZwift ride would cause it to crash… and frequently for some riders!
Reducing the number of riders showing fixed the overload.
Correct as I understand it. It’s to accommodate iGPUs basically, which are by far the most common way of displaying the game and always have been. Pretty sure there’s even a JM quote saying as much somewhere.
