When attempting to start Zwift on my ROG Flow Z13 I am able to hit “Let’s Go” and the Blue Z screen shows up and gives a few “Ride On” messages but then eventually freezes with the main menu music playing.
I have made sure my PC is up to date and am not seeing this issue on my other PCs. I’ve tried reinstalling everything, running in certain compatibility modes but always have the same issue.
Others seem to be having the same issue. I just downloaded Zwift for the first time this week so I just saw the issue but some of the reddit posts describing about the same issue go back 6 months.
Attached some photos on what the freeze looks like and my Flow Z13 specs
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately that wasn’t it either. I saw that thread the other day and rolled back all those updates but still ran into the same freeze
That’s one expensive laptop, way more than I paid for my gaming rig with a Ryzen 9 7950X and RTX5070 and 64GB on Windows 11 Pro few months ago before prices went boom.
I managed to get Zwift run by copying my prefs.xml from an old laptop and setting Fullscreen = 1. In fullscreen mode, Zwift runs perfectly at 120–140 FPS.
But with Windowed-Mode ist Crashes on my Z13 32GB 2025.
James you should still have a prefs.xml in your Documents folder even without being able to get the game to work, I did at least.
If you edit that file to put Fullscreen 1 Fullscreen under the Config section it should startup without issue. Not sure why it won’t let me copy the actual formatting of the code but just copy the formatting the rest of the xml uses.
@Jackson_Halupnik Well blow me! I was looking in the wrong ‘documents’ folder. So found the prefs.xml file in the Zwift documents folder and downloaded an XML editor. Changed fullscreen to ‘1’ as suggested by @Daniel_Rausch and it seems to have worked! Have never got to the main screen before. Will give it a full test at lunchtime to see how it works.
After struggling to get Nintendo emulation to run on Z13 2025, I researched reddit and got a very helpful tipp: Disable “Hardware GPU scheduling” in Windows Settings. This solved my emulation problem and happily also the Zwift-windowmode-problem. After turning this of restart your PC and it should run fine!
Thanks @Daniel_Rausch It seemed to run fine just from the prefs mod, but I have also disabled the “hardware GPU scheduling” setting as well just to be sure.
No crashes or freezing since these mods so seems to be the cause of the issues. Your help is greatly appreciated!!
Hopefully Zwift will pick up on this thread and resolve for others.
