Usually I don’t use my iPad Pro 12,9” (1TB) for Zwift as I have a dedicated PC (Ryzen and GeForce 2060) for Zwift at home.
But at the moment I’m on vacation and using it on my iPad in the Gym here (biking and running).
The graphics performance is horrible. Washed out graphics, stuttering slow frame rates. I can’t measure it but I would say it’s running on 30fps and seeing drop downs to 3-4 fps.
This is on all worlds. Not only on the new night course. If there are other Zwitters visible or not. Also navigating thru the menus is stuttering.
As I tried Zwift before on my iPad, this does not seem to be normal as it was running smoothly.
Has this something to do with the latest update?
It’s even running better on my iPhone 13 Pro Max.
I’ve never had any issues like that running on iPad. Any chance that the internet in the gym is just spotty?
I was able to stream the Ironman without a problem. 2 days ago I tried without streaming a video. And had the same stuttering.
This might sound silly, but have you tried rebooting the iPad? Your experience doesn’t sound right at all, and no-one else has been reporting this.
Was your battery > 50%. I’ve noticed on my iPad Air 4th gen that the frame rate drops much lower once the battery hits 50%. It might be to save power.
First try it was around 80%. 2nd was around 40%.
But after some more tests I think it was thermal throttling.
It’s around 31°C here. Even the Gym has AC and around 25°C it might be to hot for the M1 without active cooling.
Yes. Seems to be thermal throttling. Today with a „cool“ iPad it ran smoothly about a hour. Did not tested it longer if it will start throttling again.
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Ok, I did some more testing. My statement about thermal throttling was wrong.
Zwift is definitely throttling FPS if under XX% battery charge. At the moment I don’t know exactly at what percentage, but its there.
Today I started with 49% and it was stuttering and low FPS. Finished with 39% and still the same. Ran Geekbench 5 CPU and GPU Benchmark and 3DMark Wildlife.
Then connected charger → after 3 seconds Zwift shifts to high FPS mode. Ran benchmarks again → same score (even a bit slower on AC).
So the root cause seems to be Zwift itself that’s going into low power mode.
I will open a support case about that.
I think it’s much more likely that iPadOS is thermal throttling system performance depending on battery level. It won’t be Zwift doing it.
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I don’t think so as other apps and benchmarks are not affected at all.
Benchmarks may be able to switch the throttling off, or the other way round - the OS stops throttling when it detects a benchmark running. Plus you don’t know that the benchmark stresses the system in the same way that the benchmarks do.
Sure I don’t know. But the benchmarks go full load. For graphics and CPU. And they show no difference for battery or ac. Zwift is showing a lot of difference.
I started a support case for that problem.
At the moment it looks like its Zwift.
There haven’t been any reports on throttling around yet for Apple and M1 in iPad. And with AC or higher battery there is no throttling at all.
Only some Android dudes are doing benchmark optimizations.