With the update Wednesday to game version 1.0.64913 many – like really many – have suddenly experienced crazy power numbers when using one of these trainers:

• Tacx Boost
• Tacx Booster
• Tacx Blue Matic
• Tacx Blue Motion

The problem is not with your speed sensor, nor the trainer itself, but Zwift introduced a bug. It changed the power curve which is defined in-game and used to translate speed to power.

We’ll have to wait for Zwift to fix it for real but in the meantime you can get riding with realistic number simply by selecting a different trainer model from the list in the pairing screen.

I dug into the defined power curves and found what seems to be fairly close matches:

• Choose Jetblack M5 Mag Pro instead of Tacx Boost
• Choose Tacx Blue Twist instead of Tacx Booster
• Choose Jetblack M5 Mag Pro instead of Tacx Blue Matic
• Choose Minoura MagRide-60 instead Tacx Blue Motion

Simply choose the alternative trainer instead of your Tacx when pairing (but remember to let the trainer resistance setting be the same as always for your Tacx – simply ignore what Zwift says it should be for the alternative trainer).

Here are the power curves so you can see how they compare. The graphs show power (watt) as a function of speed (mph) – how much power Zwift calculates you are putting into the pedals based on the speed of your rear wheel:

Just follow https://mstdn.social/@zwifthacks to get the news.

Whenever there is a new version of Zwift or Zwift Companion App ready for download, it will automatically be posted within a few minutes.

You can always find the current version numbers here: Zwift Versions. They are updated automatically, too.

Be notified by Zwift Forums

The Zwift ‘What’s new’ forum category is where you find the official release notes from Zwift. Here you can set up notifications for new topics. This way you will be alerted when Zwift post a release note.

To set up your notifications you simply click the bell icon and choose when to be notified of changes. The ‘Watching First Post’ is a good choice here.

Windows 10 come with a few pre-configured power plans. The default Balanced power plan can be OK for normal computer usage, but for the best performance when zwifting you need a High performance power plan which does not try to limit CPU utilisation in your computer.¹

So, here are the steps to ensure that your computer uses a High performance plan.

1. Choose the High performance power plan.
2. If that fails: Restore a missing High performance power plan
3. If that also fails: Create a High performance plan

Choose the High performance power plan

Open Settings – Power & sleep

Choose Additional power settings:

If the Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options window you simply select the High performance option (if there is one), and you are done.

Restore a missing High performance power plan

What if there is no High performance power plan to choose (yes, it can happen)?

Depending on your computer you will only have the Balanced power plan available by default, but you can most likely create the High performance plan like this:

Launch a command prompt (use Windows search to find the Command Prompt app).

In the Command Prompt windows, paste the following line and press Enter:

powercfg -duplicatescheme 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

Open or reload the Power Options window and select your new High performance plan.

If you still do not see a High performance plan, on your computer you will have create your own High performace power plan with the next steps, so read on².

Create a High performance plan

If the above steps failed, here is how to create a custom High performance plan for a Zwift computer:

Choose Create a power plan in the left side panel of Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options.

Select the High performance option, name you power plan, and press Next.

You may want to change the basic settings, so the computer does not go to sleep or turns off the display so soon, but this is less important.

Click the Create button.

Now you have created a High performance power plan (this one was named FULL POWER). It will automatically be selected as the active power plan.

Select Change plan settings, and in the Edit Plan Settings dialogue select Change advanced power settings.

In the advanced settings you can see that Minimum processor state when Plugged in is set to 100%. This gives you the best possible use of your CPU when zwifting (assuming you run with your computer connected to a power outlet).

You can change the following advanced setting to prevent USB devices from suspending. It may not be a problem if you do not, but it should not do any harm, either:

Change USB selective suspend setting to Disabled and press OK.

That was it.

1. As pointed out by Dave Higgins in the Facebook group ZPCMR – Zwift PC Master Race you are likely to experience stuttering otherwise.
2. See the linked article at Ten Forums for more explanation of this if interested: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/110372-restore-missing-default-power-plans-windows-10-a.html

What can be done about that? Read on to find out more (some of the nerdier stuff is in the footnotes).

The problems

• Zwift is very vulnerable to other programs running, often with a very visible drop in frames per second (FPS) if you launch another program.

• Rubber banding can occur when the CPU is processing stuff for other programs. Zwift cannot get its calculation of position and screen updates done fluidly, and especially in views 1 and 2 you will experience that odd back and forth rubber band effect.¹

• Another odd behaviour is how Zwift freezes when it is processing screen shots.

A simple fix

A simple and easy fix for many of these problems is to increase the process priority for the ZwiftApp.exe process². By doing that Zwift simply gets higher priority for its data processing than most other processes on your computer. It is all it takes to make Zwift run visibly smoother!³

I’ve tested this repeatedly⁴. A simple thing such as launching a browser or just switching to a browser with some animated SVG graphics would cause visible stuttering in Zwift at the normal process priority. Raising the process priority to ‘Above normal’ made Zwift run smoothly through the same scenarios, even when launching other applications in rapid succession.^{5 6}

Set up once and worry no more

You can do it manually every time you have launched Zwift via the Windows Task Manager, but I’m going to explain how to set it up to be the standard whenever you launch Zwift.

It’s a three step procedure:

1. Download and install Process Hacker
2. Launch Zwift and configure the process priority
3. Zwift

Let’s do it!

Step 1: Download and install Process Hacker

You have to download and install a free, open source program called ‘Process Hacker’. It’s a replacement for the normal Windows Task Manager with a lot of extra functionality.

One of the many features is that it lets you save which priority a process (think ZwiftApp.exe) should run with whenever it runs. When ‘Process Hacker’ itself is running it monitors the other processes on your computer and can make your saved changes to process priority.

So, download Process Hacker (version 2.3.9) here: https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/

Run the setup program you downloaded. Just make a full installation, but if you want to customise the installation definitely remember to include the ‘User notes’ plugin in your installation.

I recommend you also choose the following options during install:

• Start Process Hacker on system startup (otherwise you will have to start ‘Process Hacker’ manually)
• Minimized on system tray

You can let ‘Process Hacker’ run all the time. To keep it hidden in the Taskbar tray when it is not used and to prevent that you accidentially exit it, the following options are very useful (set them via the ‘Options’ menu in the ‘Process Hacker’ program after installation):

• Hide when closed
• Hide when minimized

Step 2: Launch Zwift and configure the process priority

Now, launch Zwift. When the main game window opens after login and pressing ‘Lets go’, it’s time to make the configuration in ‘Process Hacker’ which we want.

Launch ‘Process Hacker’ if its not already opened.

In ‘Process Hacker’, search for ‘ZwiftApp’ in the search field top right.

Right click the line with ZwiftApp.exe, choose ‘Priority’, then ‘Above normal’.

Now comes the most important part: Right click the line with ZwiftApp.exe, choose ‘Priority’, then ‘Save for ZwiftApp.exe’ option at the bottom of the right click menu.

That’s it!

Step 3: Zwift

Well, just ride on.

As long as ‘Process Hacker’ is running (remember that you set it up to launch with Windows and to hide itself in the taskbar tray) it will set the process priority to ‘Above normal’ every time you launch Zwift.

Final remarks ⁷

This is definitely not the solution to all problems with stuttering, FPS drops, and rubber banding. It won’t make a slow computer more powerful, and it won’t dramatically increase the performance of Zwift. It just can help a bit in making Zwift run more smoothly. The effect you see can vary a lot, depending on your computer configuration, Zwift version etc.

Footnotes

1. Rubber banding can have other reasons, e.g. at high performing systems where the FPS gets capped at 60 FPS due to display limitations, so this is not the solution to all rubber banding issues
2. This primarily makes sense if you run Zwift in window mode and run other programs in parallel with Zwift, but could also be beneficial in fullscreen mode if Zwift competes with other processes already running in advance. Note added 2020-10-27 17:06 CET
3. Zwift seems to be coded without considering that the user can be running other programs simultaneously such as browsers, OneDrive, and Dropbox. Naturally, this ‘fix’ doesn’t really improve the way Zwift is coded and how it works, but it does remove some of the visible symptoms it has.
4. Windows 10, Version 20H2 (OS Build 19042.608), running Zwift version 1.0.57620. Note added 2020-10-27 17:15 CET
5. A downside to increasing the Zwift process priority will of course be that the priority of other processes will be lower, relatively speaking. They can be slowed a bit but for me that is definitely an acceptable tradeoff while zwifting.
6. There seems to be no particular benefit in increasing the Zwift process priority even further (to High or Realtime).
7. Remarks added 2020-10-27 17:07 CET

There are a couple of tricks you have to know to resize, zoom, and move your map around in ZwiftMap. This animation demonstrates it quickly, and below it the details are explained:

You can resize the windows in ZwiftMap after pressing Win+Alt+Z in Windows or Cmd+Alt+Z in macOS. Drag the borders or double click inside the window to maximise it.

To zoom in and out you have to switch mode with Win+Alt+S / Cmd+Alt+S. It also enables the ZwiftGPS menu and lets ZwiftGPS react to mouse and keyboard input. Now you can zoom in/out with your mouse wheel while your cursor is over the ‘Zoom here’ area top-right.

When you are in the ZwiftGPS input mode (after pressing Win+Alt+S / Cmd+Alt+S) you can shift the map around inside the window. Just click and drag anywhere on the map (except for the ‘Zoom here’ area and the menu control).

Do you have an iOS 13 device? The article also contains an updated description of how to find your user ID in iOS Safari.

Here is the updated article:

my.zwift.com/profile/emails

That profile page unfortunately doesn’t have a direct link anywhere in my.zwift.com but only in the footer of emails you receive.

What’s the best tutorial to learn the basic facts for Zwift? How to find the different routes, what the thumbs up logo means, …

That is a question often asked from new Zwifters. Here is my answer to just this question:

Zwift has quite a lot of instruction videos at zwift.com/video/how-to-cycling which you should look at.

Besides that support.zwift.com is a great source of information, too. Go there, click where it says ‘Cycling’ and find several support articles, also for the new Zwifter.

The community has also produced some exceptionally good sources of information:

zwiftinsider.com has a lot of good information including descriptions of all the routes, …

Regards,
Jesper from ZwiftHacks

I would like to be able to build a 10 mile Time Trial race/workout. I know how to create workouts on Zwift but it would be cool to create a distance based workout rather than a time based one.

What you can do is use What’s on Zwift? to create a workout from a GPX file.

Create a 10 mile route in any route planner, upload the GPX file to What’s on Zwift, and get a custom made Zwift workout.

The resulting workout is still time based but the time is determined from the route distance and elevation data together with your FTP, weight, and the wanted intensity factor. 

Of course, if you want you can edit the workout in the workout editor in Zwift.

When your FTP or weight changes you can just as easily create a new workout from the same GPX file.

Bonus tip

You can find many ready-made routes online, e.g. at Ride With GPS. Here is a selection: Route search at Ride With GPS.

In this post – the first of a series – I show you how to find it in a secure manner using your log file.

Part two will show you how to find it from my.zwift.com.

Part One: The log file holds the truth…

… or at least it contans your Zwift user ID hidden among the many log lines. This makes it very easy to find your user ID. Here are a couple of way to do it without you having to read through the log file yourself.

#1 – on Windows

Copy this line, press Windows+R, paste the line into the Run dialogue, and press Enter:

cmd /k find /i "player id" %UserProfile%\documents\zwift\logs\log.txt

The result is like this:

(You can just close the window when you are done)

#2 – on macOS

Copy this line, paste it into a Terminal window, and press Enter:

grep -i 'player id' ~/Documents/Zwift/Logs/log.txt

The result is like this:

#3 – with help from a web app

The app at https://zwifthacks.com/app/id/ does essentially the same as the searches above, just in a browser. You can drag a log file into the dropzone (look for log.txt in your Documents/Zwift/Logs folder or send it to yourself from the iOS version of Zwift).

In a moment your user ID will be shown:

Coming up: Part Two: Finding your ID on my.zwift.com