Suddenly this week I started having many issues with Bluetooth, not discovering, hanging on connecting and dropping my power meter and play controllers mostly. I have tried 3 different dongles and my native Bluetooth (so 4 different Bluetooth devices from 4.1 to 6.0), had the drivers removed and reinstalled etc. Removed my hub, ant dongle etc but still the same
During rides the screen freezes, I still hear sounds, the body of my avatar disappear but my head and scotty mascotte and bike are still there, then 2-20s everything starts moving again. (And yes I rebooted my laptop, entire network and tried reinstalling zwift)
This usually indicates an issue with the device running Zwift. You mention a laptop, can you.list the specs? The CPU or graphics card could be bottlenecks I assume.
I haven’t heard enough detail about your equipment to hazard a guess. CPU exhaustion can certainly cause Bluetooth issues as well, but perhaps that is no longer happening (hard to say without some data about how the system is performing such as a trainerdx/zwiftalizer report or visibility into the busiest single CPU core). If any of the dongles use the Realtek RTL8761B chipset, then I would assume that one is probably acceptable. For the others, it depends on what they are. I don’t have any experience with the BT 6.x dongles since no trainers support BT 6, so I’ve had no reason to use them.
The connection problems already arise at the login screen. I cannot check the exact Bluetooth chipset but 2 of the dongles definitely are realtek (bt 5.4)
Those RealTek dongles are very likely the correct type. Have you already tried pairing fewer things, such as only the trainer and nothing else? I still haven’t heard anything about whether you are CPU bound or not. Zwift will mostly camp out on a single CPU core so overall utilization of a multi-core CPU is not very important - the thing to look for is one core that is maxed out.
It certainly could be fully utilized at 25% if it’s a quad core, though it’s not guaranteed to be. Which generation is the CPU? You should be able to see that in System Information or DXDIAG.
This article explains how to view logical processor utilization in Task Manager:
@Radek_Kucera I recommend starting a new thread so we don’t mix up this discussion with an unrelated problem. If you do that, please share all the details about your equipment - the Zwift machine specs, the model of trainer, how you’re pairing things, description of what you’re seeing, screenshots if you can do that.
You should take a game log file from after the problem started, upload it to TrainerDX and hit the Share button there, post the URL here so we can talk about how it’s performing.
This is an extremely slow CPU for running Zwift on Windows, released more than 11 years ago, plus if the laptop is struggling to cool itself, that might also cause the CPU clock speed to go down. For example if the system is full of accumulated dust or pet hair, that could easily do it.
If you can’t actually pair the trainer and do a proper ride, you can still get a game log by doing a “just watch” session, let it run for 10 minutes or so, close the game, upload the log file to TrainerDX and see how it performs.
You should be able to get a log file by doing “just watch” without pairing anything. Were you able to start a session that way? If you do, let it run for 10 minutes or so, then I would hit the return-to-me button and bring up the pairing screen again, see if anything is different, then save & quit, look for the log file.
Your laptop meets the minimum specs for running Zwift, but I am curious how it’s performing - ie, is your experience normal or not for that hardware? TrainerDX (zwiftalizer) lets you search for other log reports from people with your same CPU so if you’re able to upload a log, you would be able to compare it to other reports from similar laptops.
For example here is one from game version 1.101 where a user with an i7-4710HQ ran for 39 min with average frame rate of 33FPS, though 1% lows are 13FPS which is quite poor.
Like I said I have only this laptop for zwift for over 1 year without any issues connecting or dropping until last week. 2nd of november no problems, 3rd of november I only tried swift control but that app was installed on my phone, I couldn’t get swift control to connect but didn’t zwift. Tuesday november 4rd I tried to do an unlocked race, couldn’t pair my power meter anymore via Bluetooth, so switched to ant and the controllers wouldn’t either and at some point the game just hung and I lost the group
To sum up for the past 54 weeks in zwift I had no problems until november 3rd or 4th
Your history with the machine is of only limited use here. A computer is not an immutable object that never changes, and the same is true for your wireless environment, so the question is how is this machine performing right now and are the performance problems related to the Bluetooth problems - I don’t know either of those things based on what you have shared.
Have you removed that app? I’m just curious if there is diverted pairing going on here, since that would also be consistent with the Bluetooth pairing problems on the laptop. I would delete it while you are troubleshooting.
