Some avatars flickering in large bunch

Thanks for suggestion tho.

The rider flickering has been going on for a month or so, and I see it really bad in large groups on AppleTV. It is borderline unbearable from a visual perspective. Also notice lots of flickering on the mini map. Any updates on this? Really avoiding large group rides now.

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I don’t see any flickering on my Apple TV in large rides.

Which model of Apple TV and OS do you have? I have the first-gen 4K model (2017) and tvOS 15.1.

I have the same setup; when IĀ“m in the big blob in really BIG events the flickering is terrible. Avatars around me keep appearing and disappearing individually and randomly in a very fast frequency. It gets better when the blob gets smaller. ā€œSmallā€ groups of about 200 participants are no problem, but the ā€œRide with Reggieā€ for example with about 2000 participants was terrible till the pack was sorted.

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I assume those are events bigger than 100 riders and you are at the back of the pack. My thinking is that is because Zwift only draw 100 riders and the focus is on those infront of you then Zwift draw and erase the riders next to you as they become part or leave the 100 rider group.

Zwift used to draw riders in a radius around you so you would always see those around you even if it was 1000 riders. I prefer that method. But due to limitations of some devices it has been scaled down.

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That“s for sure, but my wife was in the same event with her Windows PC riding along in the same blob, she had no flickering at all. It was a HUGE contrast.

She is on the superior device. LOL. Just kidding.

What sepp was describing is exactly what I see. I have a video I sent to support. I get for sure that AppleTv (first gen 4k) is limited, but at the same time, it was fine until an update a month ago or so. Usually, you need to be towards the back of a big group. Also, I noticed the dots on the mini map are flickering in the same area. I don’t see why it couldn’t be optimized… It could be the riders are ā€˜behind me’ (ever so slightly so you still see them) so they are being dropped for performance reasons. Not really sure, but man it is nauseating. I don’t see it mentioned much here in forums but in game chat it seems very pervasive. I mean, can someone at zwift hq jump on a large c group with AppleTv, drift to the back of the group? Maybe time to go to a PC.

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I did another Neokyo Badge Hunt ride this morning. Biggest one yet for me, with 860 riders. No flickering whatsoever.

I’m not posting this to be unhelpful - quite the opposite. I’m trying to figure out why some people get this problem and I don’t.

Do those with flickering always force-close the Zwift app after each ride so that each ride is a fresh instance?

You might want to join today’s group ride with Mark Cavendish at 6 pm CET - I’m pretty sure the first ten or so minutes will be awful :woozy_face:

Btw: I do force quit Zwift on ATV every time, so that can’t be the problem. And I use ATV solely for Zwift.

Haha - as predicted, it was just awful in the big front pack around Mark. I stopped after 5 minutes, let myself fall back to the very back of the pack and rode with them - no more flickering.

Edit: Then I logged out on ATV and logged back in on iPhone SE per late join - no flickering at all in the big blob.

In the Cav ride I noticed big chunks of the ā€˜100 nearest riders’ group disappearing and reappearing intermittently. Not seen this behaviour for a few years,
even in hugely popular events like this one. I assume it was due to high CPU load, made even higher due to the event being on Makuri Islands. Might not be related to the issue in this thread of course, but I thought I’d mention it.

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Same was happening to me, very hard to look at riders appearing and disappearing.

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I have noticed the flickering started about 4-5 weeks ago which coincided with an update. Around that time the new pack dynamics AI was introduced… coincidence or not. Perhaps the algorithm to draw the closest 100 riders and the new pack dynamics has created this issue. It definitely has other factors that seem to make it manifest including the amount/type of world content being drawn and the draw distance (i.e., long straight stretched where you can see far into the horizon). The popping in and out of rendering of riders is periodic versus a constant problem.

@Wes any investigation into this?

Flickering issue is still persistent for some users. Was on an endurance ride today and could visually barely look on the screen. I am on an iPad with iOS 15.2.
Also I am riding in shadow all the time, the sunlight is always ahead of me…
@shooj, @Wes: are you aware of these issues?

I am happy to see a lot of fixes in 1.20 and hope to see more fixes to come. Thanks!

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The Badge Hunt rides are probably not dense enough to trigger it. While they’ve got a lot of riders, they get very spread out and usually settle into smaller bunches (say, 10-20 riders) with gaps in between.

Where I’ve seen this is very dense groups, like the Coco pace bunch or big events with notable ride leaders that people want to hang with, like Reggie Miller and Rigoberto Uran’s rides.

Plenty of flickering during my ride with Coco this morning using AppleTV. Good incentive to stay at the front of the pack!

Happened to me again yesterday on the Ashton Lambie group ride (250 or so riders) on Apple TV. Going through the desert in a tight bunch the flickering was almost seizure inducing. Didn’t seem to lose the draft and all the data on the Riders Nearby display was consistent. Soon as we hit Titan’s Grove and strung out it stopped. I road with the C-Bot as a warm up and had no issues in that group.

Still happening on iOS-Zwift as well; but it seems ZHQ is working on this, I have noticed that non-group related avatars seem to get hidden/disabled (edit: to some extend). I tried to switch from C- to B-Pace bot, but no chance: I realized B-bot in the moment the whole bunch was on my height - not earlier, no greenish beam, nothing. They were far off until I could react, U-turn and … stopped sprinting after a few seconds. @Wes: hope you fix the flickering but keep the ability to switch to other bots… :wink: