I have been running Zwift on an older Dell XPS 8300 desktop running Win10 for a while now with no problems. I have it connected to the my router over a wired connection and to the Internet via a Gigabit fiber connection and usually get > 800 Mbps upload and download according to Speedtest. This PC is used almost exclusively for Zwift, with very few apps installed.
My last couple rides I noticed that Zwift started having some issues after about 30 minutes. Rider avatars would disappear intermittently. After about 45 minutes it would be happening regularly and the screen would freeze a bit also. Nearing an hour it was almost unridable and even the ride time was losing time to “real” time.
This morning I stopped my ride (It took a log time for Zwift to recognize and react to my clicks on the menu etc.), and restarted Zwift, after which it worked fine for another 20 minutes to finish my ride.
I haven’t looked into it too closely yet. TaskManager does show “Very High” Power Usage, but not high CPU or memory usage. I don’t think it’s a PC issue since restarting the app (and not the PC) resolved the issue, so would suspect some kind of memory leak that’s causing performance issues over time.
When you say rider avatars are disappearing, is that just the rider vanishing and leaving the bike without a rider, or are both bike and rider for other riders disappearing?
It starts out as just the riders disappearing and leaving the bikes behind, and eventually everything disappears.
That’s a sign of the PC not coping with the load. It night look like there’s not high CPU utilisation, but Zwift is single-threaded so one core can be maxed out whle your graph of total CPU usage (all cores) looks fine.
You could upload a Zwift log file to zwiftalizer.com to see what’s happening, but my guess is something is maxing out a CPU core. It looks like the XPS 8300 uses a 2nd gen Intel CPU which will never perform very well but I would expect that absent other problems it would work OK. Does the machine have 8GB+ RAM and solid state storage? You might consider doing a Windows reset or clean install of Windows since it sounds like you don’t have a lot of time invested in setting it up. If it still has the old mechanical HDD then upgrading it to SSD would be very cheap and basically no more work than doing the clean Windows install. If the machine is swapping on slow storage that can cause the CPU to wait for the storage.
If you have the i7 2600 CPU you can compare it (or whichever CPU you do have) to a search result from zwiftalizer.com to see whether your numbers match what other people are getting. I’m guessing not.
This same system has been running Zwift fine for over a year.
I’m not sure what to look for in the logs.
This was from the other day when I first started noticing the issue. FPS isn’t great (I don’t really care), but drops off to unusable after an hour.
I lowered the resolution to 720p and experienced the same issue.
I would think that the problem would show itself pretty quickly if it was hardware related.
The problem goes away if I restart the app, so I don’t think it is an overheating/throttling issue.
I left Zwift running in the “Just Watch” mode and it exhibited the same behavior.
That FPS is a crater in the ground. I think your hardware is acceptable even if it’s not great, and it should be doing far better than that. I’ve made my suggestions so if you would like confirmation or more ideas I suggest going to the ZPCMR group on Facebook. Or go ahead and reinstall Windows and try again. Or reapply the thermal paste for the CPU and try again.
I looked up FPS numbers for people using the i7 2600 on zwiftalizer and they were far better than that.
I am experiencing somewhat the same. The first minute the workout is already slow and just keeps getting worse.
I am a new user of Zwift, but had like 7 or 8 good rides, everything working fast and perfectly. Until the last two rides, it started giving me this behaviour.
Frame rate is low at the start and dropping more and more. At the end of the workout after 2 hours, I cant even get to get the activity saved. Sometimes the Hud gets corrupted too and it takes a long time before it refreshes to a good state again.
I tried reinstalling Zwift, killing onedrive and virus scanner etc.
I have a quite decent pc, it should not have any problems running Zwift (which at first it also did not) and I have a fast internet connection.
Any help would be appreciated.
Similar issues here. Was working fine and now really struggling. Laptop is 16GB RAM and only a few months old.
There have been a lot of reports of poor FPS or high memory usage on systems with AMD graphics lately that were helped by installing the latest driver from the AMD website. In general if you come here to talk about PC problems it really helps if you provide detailed specs about the machine since there is so much variation in Windows hardware and the solution often lies in those details.
I can confirm having AMD graphics. I gor tipped to run updates, so I checked Windows Update (which did not really have anything related in my opinion). I updated Zwift, it did have an update at that time, although it was already quite up to date. So not sure if that was part of the fix.
I did update the graphics drivers and I changed the energy settings of my system to best performance (which was on balanced before).
That fixed the problem. Probably only had to update the graphics driver, so try that first =)
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I was originally going to update this thread to say that my wife’s laptop (Acer Aspire 3 15) started behaving the same way (slowing down after 30 minutes), but after some Windows 10, and Zwift updates, both her laptop and the XPS 8300 are running Zwift fine again.
