I ran into a problem during my workout today: Zwift crashed twice on my PC.
The first crash happened roughly 10 minutes in, during the warm-up. The application simply closed with no error message or any other information. I restarted Zwift and began the workout again, but it crashed a second time after about 20 minutes.
I have never experienced this before, and today it happened twice in a row. In the Companion app, only the second ride of 20 minutes appears.
Could a recent update be causing this? And is there a way for me to send you a crash report for further analysis?
My system specifications:
Intel Core i9-9900K
NVIDIA RTX 4090
64GB DDR4
Contact support if you want them to look at the game logs. support@zwift.com
I have not heard of any widespread Windows problems with the 1.120 update.
When the game crashes, it’s normal to lose up to around 10 minutes of ride data.
On that system you should disable the Video Screenshots setting in Zwift if you’re having stability problems. I don’t know if that’s what happened but it’s not an uncommon problem.
Support may tell you to update the Nvidia driver, and while that might help, the driver that comes with Windows is generally stable and there are no performance benefits to running anything newer. A clean Windows install with a fresh Zwift install and no installation of anything downloaded from Nvidia should be stable.
Thanks Paul for the quick reply. I wrote an email to support. While I was trying to disable the Video Screenshots setting you mentioned it crashed a third time. Hope this gets fixed soon.
Since there haven’t been other reports like yours recently, I would not count on any software fix coming from Zwift unless someone corroborates it. My own Windows 11 system with an Nvidia RTX 2060 is still stable. This does not rule out a bug of some kind but I’m not hearing the kind of noise I would expect if this were related to the release. Time will tell about that, but maybe you will get a response from support that will make it unnecessary to go deeper into wiping your machine as a troubleshooting step, which is obviously not very convenient. I hope you report back if they give you a solution.
If you’re accessing settings when you’re not doing a ride (like from the home screen) I would not expect a crash to be related to Video Screenshots so that may not be the cause, however you also have the option to shut down Zwift, edit prefs.xml and make sure the setting looks like this:
<VIDEO_CAPTURE_ENABLED>0</VIDEO_CAPTURE_ENABLED>
On Windows that file is located in %LocalAppData%\Zwift
While waiting for Support to get back, you might want to check your PC/Network for anomalies such as Temperatures, failing power supply, network drops, etc. If you connect your trainer via wifi, try changing the channel. I have had wifi interference from neighbors affecting apps and always change my default wifi channels.
In fact yesterday after reporting the problem I experienced the same issue with another app. It was crashing and giving me an error that some files were corrupted. I started a mutli hour troubleshoot and finally identified the problem being related to Windows Defender which was corrupting files getting loaded in memory by the apps (probably some minifilter driver). After disabling real time protection I was able to run the other app again. Today I did another Zwift session (I believe real time protection was back on again but I didnt check) and it worked without crashing. I‘m guessing this was some temporary problem with Defender and it seems to be working again.
This started happening to me after the last update after 3 years of it never crashing once. The only thing that changed was the zwift version. Have there been more reports? I will try what you advise.
Nothing much being reported about the current update but those issues are usually related to the specific hardware in your device running the game, so please share all the details about it if you would like some suggestions. That does not mean it isn’t a bug but so far things have been pretty quiet about this release so either we talk more about the details or you can contact support directly and ask them why it died.