Zwift Crashing/Freezing Mid ride

I’ve posted a couple or few times way up but thought I’d come back to say mine has now been crash free for a few weeks.

To save looking back, my PC spec is -
Home built tower,
I5 9400 processor
16GB ram
Radeon RX590 8GB running latest firmware
Windows 10 20H2
All windows updates done.

I’ve also had a few (other) game crashes and reading into a fix for that seems to have stopped the Zwift crashing too.

All I did was throttle back the video card slightly in the Radeon software. It has 8 steps for maximum frequency at given load points. The top one was reduced something like 5% and all others 6 to 7%.

The internet theory behind this is some graphics cards are over driven by default and simply can’t take it. For example the maximum stable frequency of my graphics card is apparently 1580Mhz. It was set at 1690Mhz out of the box. Not sure if this could be called clocking as in theory they are at 100% and don’t get too hot. I’ve dropped it to the 1580Mhz and so far all rosy.

Alongside this I set the processor to 100% min and max usage and disabled all power saving options.

Benchmarks suggest it is 5% down on previous but still in the top area for other similar specification PCs.

Zwift is all set to maximum everything and I do run it in windowed mode to make it easer to move over onto my TV second screen for the turbo.

I do occasionally see the game stutter and jerk for a second which is when it used to freeze before. It now recovers and by the time I’ve thought about swearing at it I am back to blowing and riding again.

I’m no expert on PCs and clock speeds etc but I do wonder if by default Zwift occasionally asks slightly more than the GPU can give. If it is borderline at the top end anyway, this may result in a crash. Having some theoretical ‘headroom’ might just be preventing it.

Could all be gibberish but as I say mine is working 100% now on Zwift and everything else.
Might be worth a go for those that can tweak their GPU settings.

I’ll report back in a month or sooner if it crashes before.

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Same here . I used two laptops and both freeze. One of the laptop is brand new

New laptop does not automatically mean enough power for Zwift. What are the specs?

Edit - found your other postings.

I also experience systematic crashes recently with my Surface Laptop 3 with Intel Iris Plus graphic chip.

I thought I’d share my experience as I’ve been having similar problems to some described above. For me, the zwfit app on Windows 10 Laptop was freezing and becoming unresponsive consistently around the 40 minute usage mark. It’s a Dell Inspiron 3493, i5-1035G1, 8mb RAM, integrated Intel UHD graphics.

I initially tried:

  • Clean windows install
  • All windows and driver updates as per windows update
  • Clean Zwift install
  • Install manufacturer app (Dell) to check for driver updates. This installed a further 6 or 7 driver updates over and above windows update

None of these fixed the problem and the Zwift app froze consistently around the 40 minute mark. This led me to think the issue was to do with overheating (also based on the comment of Adam above). I’ve now done the below and it has worked for longer sessions twice without crashing.

To try and reduce power usage and I guess therefore also reduce heat I did this:

  • Installed Intel Graphics Command Center and set the power options for both plugged in and battery to prioritise battery life rather than performance
  • Opened Windows Graphics Settings. Browsed to find zwiftapp.exe and set the graphics preferences to be Power Saving
  • Set the power mode slider (clicked the battery icon in the system tray) and slid to Best Battery Life
  • Set the power settings within Zwift to support best battery life rather than best performance
  • Found a setting in the Dell power management app to focus the device on Cooling. This appeared to impact performance in Zwift and I switched it back to Optimise which restored performance again

Apart from one, none of these appear to have had an impact on game performance. Graphics quality has always been low for me anyway due to the device. Since then the app has worked without crashing for sessions a little over an hour, I haven’t tested for longer durations. I don’t know if this is a real resolution or just dumb luck, but so far I can use the app again which is great.

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Bad news.

As a follow-up, since I’ve followed Georg’s method to roll back the graphics driver about 4 weeks ago, I have had no problems with crashing/freezing. The graphics freeze I used to get at 38 min which would typically lock up the game now regularly occurs at 34 minutes, but is no more than a momentary hitch, and I’m able to continue my rides. I suggest those of you experiencing this problem give the driver change a chance.

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Just out of curiosity: do you have the auto-screenshot feature enabled? Because this also causes short hickups for me mid-ride when it is taking the snapshot.

I bought a new PC (Intel(R) Core™ i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz (8 CPUs), ~1.5GHz) based on Zwift guidelines, just to have ALL my rides freeze mid-ride or crash completely.
Raised a ticket with Zwift, they gave several “solutions”, I did all of that and finally they came back stating “There is a crashing issue with some specific i7 10th generation Intel processors” and then subsequently I enquired about timelines for them fixing this issue, the response was “thanks to the complexities of software development, it’s hard to say exactly when this will be resolved i’m afraid”

This is getting beyond the point of frustrating and with no solution in sight, I might just ask for a refund too

Thats exactly the CPU I have in my Surface, so the driver downgrade I suggested above should most likely fix it for you as well. Not solving the problem but working around it just in case you want to stick with ZWIFT despite these issues…

Thank you Georg, I will try that for sure. It is just frustrating that there is no urgency from Zwift’s side to try and assist.

If the crashes are hard to fix, maybe they could work on letting riders reconnect after a crash…

When I copy the url you posted I get a 404 error message that it might have been removed so I’m wondering if this might no longer be an option. I am still within the return period of my Surface Pro 7 and getting the same issue…is there any rig I could get that would not have this problem, e.g. any chip other than that Intel one?

Well, if you specifically bought the Surface for ZWIFT then you probably really want to return it. In any case, the old link seems to be down indeed - I just found this

https://fichiers.touslesdrivers.com/63458/SurfacePro7_Win10_18362_19.103.34215.0.msi

Note: untested and unchecked for unwanted software from my side!

EDIT: I compared the sha256 checksums for the GraphicsBase folder of the version I d/led from Microsoft and this one and they are the same…

Just tested 27.20.100.9466 (14.05.2021) - still crashes minutes into the game, so back to the old drivers.

Do you know if Zwift is able to give some kind of feedback or timeline on the fixes? I saw last night that there are plenty of riders struggling with windows crashing. But it seems there is still no urgency from Zwifts side to rectify

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Well, I somehow doubt that ZWIFT will actually fix it at all. I think that - assuming it really is a specific driver issue - all that they do is push it upstram to Intel and close tickets on it as “won’t fix” as indicated by their reply posted earlier in this thread. And at Intel I don’t know how high a priority this issue gets.

I mean, they include indeed fixes for specific issues with specific AAA games into the drivers, but I don’t know which ranking some subset of ZWIFT users using this specific chip version will have on their scale.

Hard to tell without knowing which change to the drivers triggers the crash. I thought about pinpointing the exact version that introduced the crashes and then compare the list of changes to get an idea - but honestly: I rather spend the time I have cycling than debugging this for them :wink:

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Hi Georg - have just had a read through and saw you’ve had success with a downgrade of the graphics driver. Just wondering how you’ve fared now it’s been some time since you downgraded?

All I can say: no issues anymore since I use the old driver - I did not see a single crash since the downgrade.

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Just to help others I’m going to detail my journey fighting Zwift crashes. Same problem as many other posters, when looking at my log in event viewer around the time of the crash I see the message “Display driver igfxn stopped responding and has successfully recovered.” As with other posters my laptop has integrated graphics, for the record its a Dell XPS 7390 16GB i7-1065G7 (10th gen) - about a year old and a fairly well specced PC. When I started using Zwift about 2 weeks ago my gfx driver was dated Sep 2020. As advised by Zwift support I upgraded to the latest driver (May 2021) but still had crashes. Today I installed the oldest Intel Iris plus driver I could find on the Intel site (Mar 2020 - 26.20.100.7985) - this date precedes the emergence of the graphics driver issues raised in this thread. Did a 3.5hr ride today without issue. Have everything crossed! Will provide updates! Did try installing the drivers that Georg mentioned previously - was warned by Windows they were not verified for my system but forced them on anyway and end up with a black screen - had to jump through some hoops to recover things - lesson learnt!

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