Hello Zwift Gods,
I know there has been the occasional mention of the lack of rider shadows in the Macs running M1 and M2 chipsets. I have seen very little in the way of replies from the Zwift side of things other than to mention they hope to correct this missing aspect of the game on these fairly high performing devices, but want to make sure they do it in the âright wayâ.
Just wondering if we can get any updates on this? The rider shadows are the last bastion of slightly-more-realism to the immersiveness of the game play that we are missing. Now that the performance and FPS are all pretty much solved on this architecture, and the games runs perfectly with all the prefs dialled up as high as allowed (Ultra 4k now allowed, detailed shadows, light effect, high reflections, water effects, denser foliage, long distance draw range etc, is it possible to get this option turned back on, or at least allow it to be a pref file attribute that is off by default and we can turn on for testing until you roll-out to the public?
Goodluck, we have been asking for almost a year and i think in that time we have had 2 âresponsesâ that didânt really give much indication or insight if it was going to happen. But apparently there is a âMajorâ update coming to the mac version of Zwift.
Itâs somehow weird. I had rider shadows ( and crazy performance ) on my Mac Mini M2 Pro ( both on the stock and on a modified config file ) until - and including v1.44 - but they disappeared when they pushed the 1.45 update
Iâve always thought.: ârider shadows doesnât matterâ, but it actually add quite something to the experience ( or removes when they are not there )âŚ
Hello. Recently switched to a Mac Mini M2 running high profile. I enjoyed full shadowing for a couple of weeks before update 1.45. Is there a plan to fix this issue going forward. I was hoping 1.46 may be the answer but alas. Thanks.
Hi Shuji!
Just a quick clarification - does this extend to M1/M2 iPad Pro devices as well, or only the M1/2 Macs?
I run Zwift on my iPad Pro and, like many others, would love the ability to select a higher graphics profile. These devices are so incredibly powerful, yet Zwift runs at nearly the lowest possible settings on them across the board.
Good question! The efficiency gains of writing code natively for Apple silicon apply to macOS machines that run on M1 and M2 chips. The need for Rosetta to translate code written for Intel architecture goes away, and thatâs where the improvements come from.
iPhones and iPads have always been built on ARM chips, so Zwift apps for iOS have always been written natively for ARM architecture.
Right, but is there a plan to allow iOS/iPadOS access more than the most basic visuals? Despite being native and running the same M2 processors, iPads are limited to graphics far below their macOS counterparts.
The 1.45 update, fortunately/unfortunately, assigned the M2 machines to the âhighâ profile instead of âmediumâ where they have been by default since being launched. So now the M2 machines are on the same Zwift profile as the M1 machines, and we all know that the High profile on Apple Silicon has no shadows⌠The frustrating part is that this missing shadows on High profiles likely has absolutely nothing to do with any of the other parallel issues (proper Apple Silicon support, Metal graphics support). Itâs just some oversight that nobody has bothered to fix. Probably a literal âone linerâ fix on their part, but they just refuse to give a flying F&*$ about it.
I now have it as first-hand knowledge that there is serious testing underway on all the M-silicon chip devices (by this I mean Macs, not iPads, Iâm unsure about those) and for all of this testing the shadows are purposefully turned back on. I have seen this with my own eyes and while I can see that the performance is looking very good, there are other details that have also been dialled up which is resulting on the experience not being as perfectly smooth as we are used to, which is why I feel the testing is still ongoing.
I do have a good feeling that it wonât be too long to see publicly available updates in this regard.
