Zwift freezes during rides

I am running Zwift on an I5 Windows 10 PC, with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 video card.  I experience several ‘freezes’ on every ride, where everything on the Zwift screen freezes.  These last 3-10 seconds.  When it unfreezes, I resume from the point of the freeze, but all the riders around me have moved on down the road. 

 

This has been going on for 2-3 months after 9 months or so of no freezes.  I recently discovered that the freezes do not happen if I run the Zwift app on my phone.  Since the phone is using the same network as my PC, that would seem to rule out network problems, so I think it must have something to do with my PC.

 

I am working with Zwift support, but thought I’d post here to see if someone else had encountered this and/or had any suggestions that I might try.

 

Thanks 

I get a momentary freeze every so often. Lasts a fraction of a second but it’s noticeable. It’s like a pause of 2 or 3 frames of a video. What’s strange is I have fps enabled for ZWift and it doesn’t pick up the freeze.

I’m running Windows 7, i7 CPU, nVidia GTX 1050ti.

I wonder if it has something to do with the ZML app and it trying to reconnect or disconnect as the case may be. Lately it’s dropping out of game mode.

Maybe you should try riding without the ZML app.  It didn’t make any difference in my case, but it might for you. 

I’ve wondered if my video card could have a problem.  How do you like the 1050ti with Zwift? 

Hi Steve. Yeah next ride I’ll try without ZML.

The 1050ti is great. It scores 9/10 at Zwiftalizer.com. You would notice a difference over your 620. I was so impressed I upgraded all of the other computers in my house to the same card. Budget priced card with great performance.

Have you tried running your log file through https://zwiftalizer.com ? It may give you an indication as to whether your problem is ANT, BLE, fps, network, etc related.

I have tried Zwiftalizer.  It reads the log and says that there are internet disconnects around the times of the freezes. Zwift has a known problem with disconnects and they can cause freezes.  I’ve run a monitor that detects no disconnects on my internet and the IOS app runs perfectly, and it’s on the same network.  So, it kind of brings it back to something about the computer that’s causing the Zwift app to not be able to get out to the network, which would log as a disconnect.  

I just don’t know what.  I was hoping someone had been here before me and figured it out.  

Although I’m sure that an unreliable internet connection is by far the most common fix for freezes and other things as well, common is not always. You can expect horses when you hear hoof beats, but sometimes it’s a herd of wildebeest. In my case, once I had satisfied myself that it was not a network problem, either with my ISP or my home setup, I started looking at other things. After running diagnostics and disk checkers, it became obvious that the drive was in serious trouble and it confirmed the diagnosis by dying during an effort to rebuild it. I replaced the drive, rebuilt it with an emergency drive, and now Zwift runs with ZERO freezes. Life is good. 

For what it’s worth, and it was worth quite a bit to me, I found a product called Net Uptime Monitor (about $10) a very valuable tool in helping me determine whether I had a network problem.  In my case I didn’t, but if I had, I could have used the logs it produces to go to my ISP.  There is no full disclosure necessary - I don’t know these people and get nothing for recommending their app. 

Similar problem for me only from the last couple of months. Usually after the first few mins of riding the game freezes for around 5-10 seconds, during which time the Hard drive goes mental, then it resumes as normal and everyone else is 10 seconds further up the road.

Edit: Seems like its Windows Defender scanning it in the background. Disabled it during Zwift and no problems.