Please help troubleshoot low FPS

I am a bit out of ideas what is going on. Low FPS (12-25) even though there is plenty of resources. PC is somewhat old but not too bad specs. What could possible be the issue…

Specs:

  • NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB
  • AMD Athlon 680K running at 4.2GHZ
  • 16 GB RAM DDR3 2400MHz
  • MoBo Gigabyte F2A88XN rev. 3
  • 5 GZ wifi, pretty good and stable connection

Now I get all kind of profiles, including Ultra. But no matter which one I choose I have pretty low FPS, which is quite depended on the number of riders around. Any help with troubleshooting would be much appreciated, I am honestly out of ideas…

Zwift is massively CPU bound when there are other riders around, and relies on single thread performance. Your CPU is pretty poor, I’m afraid. This is why changing the game resolution doesn’t help. Profile is different to resolution btw, you’ll always be on Ultra with a GTX 1060.

Interesting, but I thought 4.2Ghz should be quite OK? What should I be looking for when choosing another board/CPU?

Clock speed by itself itself doesn’t matter, that’s only one half of the equation. What matters most is IPC, i.e. how much data the CPU can crunch in a set amount of time. AMD CPUs prior to Ryzen are pants in this regard I’m afraid.

If you’re wanting a cheap upgrade, go for an i3-4130/50/60/70 on an H81 board and use your existing RAM (though you only need 8GB). For a proper upgrade go straight to an i3-12100F on H610, though that will require DDR4. Assuming you’re already on an SSD then everything else is fine, so just keep it.

That’s a very old CPU, so even at a relatively high clock speed it will have hugely less processing power than a modern CPU.

Edit - Dave beat me to it with a more detailed answer.