Zwift Crashing/Freezing Mid ride

Bugs and Support
378

My previous gaming laptop that I used for Zwift died after I spilled a cup of coffee on it. That one had a separate Nvidia graphics card and did not have any issues freezing during zwift rides. I switched to using my wife’s relatively new laptop that has a 10th generation Intel i5 with UHD integrated graphics. With that laptop I have been constantly plagued with group rides freezing (usually 20-30 minutes into the ride). Even just watching will freeze. After reading through this topic and I saw that Paul_Attard has successfully resolved the freezing/crashing problem by installing an older Intel UHD driver (Mar 2020 - 26.20.100.7985). I decided to try this (or else I was giving up on Zwift). My sample size of a single one-hour ride passed without any freezing after installing that driver. Clearly one ride is not enough, but I thought I’d post if anyone else here is as desperate as I was for a solution to the freezing problem. Here are details of what I did:

  1. Since I cannot post a link for the driver, go to the main Intel site and do a search for 26.20.100.7985. The 3rd link in the search results is the one to click “Intel® Graphics – Windows* DCH Drivers”.
  2. On that page there will be a “Version” pull down. Choose the last entry: 26.20.100.7985
  3. Click on the button that has “Download igfx_win10_100.7985.zip” which will download the driver zip file (presumably to your Downloads directory).
  4. make a directory and extract the zip file there.
  5. shut down all programs you are running.
  6. open an Administrator command prompt and cd to the directory you created that contains the contents of the zip file.
  7. type igxpin in the window and then follow the prompts. It will likely complain that you have a newer driver currently installed but you can ignore that.
  8. Reboot … and pray :=)

Note: the first time I did not use an Admin command window and although it seemed to install the older driver, I found the latest driver was still installed after a reboot. Then I tried an Admin command window and it worked.

Many thanks to Paul_Attard and good luck to all you suffering Intel UHD graphics Zwift users!

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