Did the same.
People should to stop paying for something that doesn’t work, regardless of the reason.
But, I suspect that for many people there is as much interest in trouble shooting a techy problem as there is in bike riding. When I came to this forum looking for help, I was surprised to find so many people with the same problem, but just living with it.
I prefer Zwift, so like you I’ll keep checking in for positive news. But I don’t expect to use it again this year.
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Yep - Zwift seem to be making no effort to contact people about this issue, so if it’s not fixed by the time my next DD payment is due I’m off to RGT & back to Trainerroad. So frustrating.
Same problem here. Newish Intel surface laptop (i7 8650U, Intel UHD 620, NVidia GTX1050). My last 2 rides crashed 50+ minutes in. Such a drag…
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Hi Guys!
While there is an apparent wide-spread issue as mentioned above, it’s not effecting everyone equally and only applies to people who have updated their GPU drivers. I’ve done some quick looking into these issues on the back ends based on your forum usernames, and have noticed the following about a few recent comments.
@alt_g You seem to be running the Nvidia 451.67 driver from June, please update your drivers and see if that resolves the issue. The most recent is 461.40 from Tue Jan 26, 2021.
@Rats_Beyfus You seem to be running Intel Build 27.20.100.8729 from September. The most recent intel driver is 27.20.100.9168 from 1/20/2021
@Bart_Simpson2 You seem to be running Intel Build 27.20.100.8681, also from September. The most recent intel driver is 27.20.100.9168 from 1/20/2021
Zwift runs best on updated drivers and old drivers can cause instabilities in your systems, so please make sure to update your GPU drivers if things aren’t working properly. If you update the drivers and the game is still crashing, we would love crash logs and game logs from anyone who hasn’t already sent them into us. The more data points we have, the quicker we can pin down specific issues.
As an additional note, we are unbelievably busy on the support team at the moment, so it may take us a while to respond to emails, but we are working through all messages in the order received as quickly as we can!
Thank you for your patience!
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I like Zwift too but I can’t waste time hitting a session hard and then it crashing over half way through. You can’t always simply restart if you haven’t got the time or, literally, the energy.
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FWIW I don’t have any issues even on Nvidia driver 432.00, the default (and well over a year old) version normally installed automatically by Windows Update upon installing an Nvidia GPU in a build for the first time. There’s literally no difference in stability or performance in my experience, in fact I’m now at the point where I don’t even bother manually installing the drivers any more because there’s no point. That said, a clean install on an old rig is never a bad thing.
Edit: certainly not saying this isn’t worth trying. 
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Thanks for the feedback Seth. I have updated the drivers per you suggestion and reinstalled Zwift (upgraded from 1.0.50 to 1.0.51). Let’s hope this fixes things:)
I’m using AMD GPU RX5700XT and have these freezes as well. It does not happen every ride but from time to time on every map.
My system runs stable with every Game. GPU drivers are up to date: Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.11.2 Recommended (WHQL)
Thanks for the response Seth. I have checked with the Intel Driver & Support Assistant, and am fully up to date. Most recent crash was on evening of 26/1/21. I have forwarded both the crash log and the Zwift log for that session via the ‘email us’ chat bot.
Nope. I updated to the new driver you mention, tried Zwift, and it crashed after 17 minutes.
Previous posts in this thread already discussed that, the fact that Windows Update isn’t finding the update for everyone, and that I tried it and it didn’t work.
Zwift can blame the users computers, or the difficulty of fixing the problem, but none of that matters. It doesn’t work for me, so I’m not wasting time and money on it.
The Zwift support team is unbelievably busy. Good point, Zwift does require an unbelievable amount of support.
It’s riding a bike, which I do to escape a sedentary, screen facing lifestyle. I don’t need trouble shooting, drivers, patience, and crash logs to ride my bike. If that’s what it takes to use Zwift, you are paying for a product that doesn’t work.
I think a number of things are probably being mixed up with these recent issues but it’s abundantly clear that there is a problem with the game crashing on low end Intel integrated graphics solutions. The newer processors are seemingly being hit the hardest. It’s probably a problem with load, where the demand suddenly ramps up too high for the Intel driver to deal with. I suspect this may be due to assets and textures suddenly popping in (or increasing in detail more harshly), which I believe got worse at some point in 2020. I highlighted it on here and I think I can see similar impacts on some lower end graphics cards I’m messing with at present. Though they don’t crash.
None of this is of any solace to you and I understand your frustration. Ultimately Zwift is a 3D game and their reluctance to admit that as such it’s unsuitable for integrated graphics - particularly on low power laptops - is probably now biting them on the backside. They prefer to pretend running it on devices struggling like mad to achieve 15fps is absolutely fine. I know that’s not what yours does btw.
Instead of pushing to improve the game as a whole which would naturally raise the bar of minimum specs over time, it’s easier to just recommend Apple TV where everyone is somehow thrilled by 30fps and the same rubbish visuals on Basic profile.
I want to give some people peace about the graphics info Dave keeps giving inccorect info on. Modern Intel integrated graphics chip (or AMD) can easily handle Zwift and there would be no logical reason why Zwift would cut off thousands of users just because someone think they should modify the minumum specs. my phone can run the game… that is telling about how little power is actually needed. 95% of people don’t need or want to pay for UHD monitors and get 200FPS on their million dollar Nvidia 3090…just no point in a bike riding/training casual game.
How about we focus on the actual bugs/issues before wasting effort on updating the graphics…
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Yeah I’m all about people spending more than necessary on their Zwift PC. Righto.
Absolutely ridiculous post.
@Blake_Steinwand
It is not only @Dave_ZPCMR , me to. But this my last post about it.
- How do you know that [quote=“Blake_Steinwand, post:174, topic:379588”]
Modern Intel integrated graphics chip (or AMD) can easily handle Zwift
[/quote]
It is not only Zwift, it is a known issue with other games, too. - I have a 7 years old PC, bought Nvidia GTX for 150 Euros last year, no issues. Don’t exactly know about exchange rates, but it is far away from million dollars
And here benchmarks comparison GTX 1650 (low end GPU) with the modern Iris:
UserBenchmark: Intel Iris Xe vs Nvidia GTX 1650 - Zwift is using Open GL, AMD GPUs are known to handle it not so well
“Modern” or “new” is not the same as “powerful”…
You seem to be taking theoretically. Dave is talking about the reality of how Zwift runs on various GPUs. You realise that how well it actually runs depends on how it’s been coded, right?
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Sorry, I don’t buy in on the AMD statement. I have a Ryzen 7 3700x with RX 5700 XT GPU
My Zwift was running fine until approx. June 2020.
6 month no issues at all. As others stated around that time Zwift startet to freeze from time to time during the rides. This happened not only on AMD GPUs but also Nvidia and Intel ones. Something changed on Zwift what makes it unstable.
I play plenty of current Games: No game crashed on my system and with high demanding games like Warzone I get easily constant 130 fps on my UWQHD 1440p monitor so I don’t accept this statement with regards to AMD. With Zwift I have frame dops below 50 fps - sorry it is just badly implemented. And they are not able to fix their issues. It becomes frustrating and I will not longer live with that and will look for something else.
You’re mixing up at least four separate issues here.
And what is your proposal? Shall I buy an Apple TV which gives me shitty graphics because Zwift is not able to implement their “Game” for a standard Gaming PC properly?
Do I as a paying customer need to take care on these technical issues? What point do you want to make? My PC is within their specs so I expect that it stops freezing. Full stop!
I’m not sure why you’re having a go at me, you’re preaching to the converted when it comes to improving the game on modern hardware. I got criticised for even suggesting it above.
Zwift doesn’t crash for me with several builds using multiple models of Nvidia GPUs (with both Intel and AMD CPUs). The problems on this thread are almost all reported with Intel integrated graphics, yours may be related but who knows. It’s probably a separate issue that needs sorting out by the devs. You’re absolutely right to be frustrated.
But while we’re at it:
-
The reason why AMD GPUs aren’t great for Zwift is because it uses OpenGL. Google ‘AMD OpenGL performance’ if you don’t believe me, this isn’t anything new, everyone knows it’s poor.
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Frame rates tank below 60fps in busy areas and group events because the CPU can’t keep up and the GPU becomes starved. Yes, even yours. You’d need a 5600X (or 5GHz Intel) to overcome what is an inherent problem with how Zwift is coded; it only responds to single thread performance. But that happens for literally everyone, and more cores/threads don’t help in any way.
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Hello,
It comforts me minimally to see that I am not the online one with this issue. I am sure Zwift development team will fix it as soon as they can because there are so many people with the same problem. I feel relief because it looks we have found the root cause. I have opened ports, use ANT+, update drives, reinstall everthning… and sooner or later the game freeze. It looks clear to me that there is a issue with Intel UHD graphics. Maybe, in some cases, with a very strong internet conections errors are minimized but It doesn’t fix the root problem.
Thanks to everyone in this post for trying to help. I hope new versions fix the problem, Otherwise, sadly I will have to find an alternative.