IMO drafting is much more realistic and you can’t power through 90 degree curves with 500watts (well you can, but the system will only “use” the maximum amount of watts it thinks is possible without crashing)
It all comes down to personal preference I guess. Just check it out, it is free (limited version, you can’t create any ride, but you can JOIN any ride). It has a bit of an indie touch, which comes with all the pros but also cons … 10 rides, 4 issues … Z: Level 33, ZERO issues.
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I’ve tried RGT 3 time - twice it worked fine, once it kept having connection problems (on their end…as i instantly switched to zwift and it worked flawless).
Out of the two, I really like zwift much better, although its way too crowded at times. RGT has good ideas of TRYING to be more realistic, but it just doesnt flow good yet. I also had some lag between when I pedaled hard and when the rider actually went hard. The routes I’ve done (non race) have been pretty empty, not many people riding. I got back on Zwift for the first time yesterday and said to myself “wow, this works a lot better” and 1 minute of riding.
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I’m a fan of (possibly because I do better in!) RGT racing. It’s very realistic, tactics work much better than Zwift. The level seems high as well, and the people at the point end generally have realistic real world numbers (one race in particular I was tortured by a guy on an U23 national level team in Italy!). Never had an issue with connection or performance, but running on a half decent graphics card on PC.
Of course, I’m in a Zwift racing league now and with that and training I can’t really do RGT races at the moment. Hopefully it’ll be even better/busier when I get back to it.
I haven’t raced but have noticed the difference between RGT and Zwift that makes them different. First, RGT need a stable and responsive internet connection. All processing is done at the server level remotely and your position related to other users and the terrain are updated every second. Much of the heavy lifting by Zwift is done locally and positioning is synchronized less often and delayed. There’s a good 3-4 seconds of delay.
Drafting is different between the two platform due to the design. In RGT you position is constantly related and updated whereas in Zwift it is delayed. If you have good foresight and/or the ride is chilled, drafting works on Zwift, otherwise it’s a ITT. It’s just hard to adjust your position if everything pop in and out every 3-4 seconds.
My connection problems on RGT comes in two flavors. First is the internet connection. It is very rare because mine is hardwired but does crop up occasionally when my router acts up. Unlike Zwift, RGT will no continue indefinitely when connection to the server is lost. I don’t know what that threshold is but it’s more than a second. Based on my ride files, I get roughly 5 minutes of dropped connections to server per hour. They are only a second in duration and does not impact my “game play”. On Zwift, my Rx sensor fails are in the neighborhood of 20-30% of game time. My Zwift ride files does not reflect and the one app I was using does not break down which sensor was not received (RGT ride file is raw). Somewhere down the line, Zwift is play some foot loose with the data. This also contribute to my perception that RGT is more life like (besides the auto braking through curves and people and lack of imagery animals).
The second connect flavor occur during initiation of the sensors. With respect to the user interface, RGT is passive while Zwift is active. In RGT, controls are done through the phone app and sensor connection is done after the game fires up. If you are using Ant+, the connection is through the screen app (Win 10 PC in my case). More than half of the time, I need to wake up my sensors in the phone app. On rare occasions, my phone app get confused and the sensor data display doesn’t synchronize. Most of the time it’s the screen app that’s not display (cadence or power) but it’s displayed on the phone app and recorded properly. Also, on my PC (Win 10 Home & Dell XPS 8930) I have found that the Bluetooth must be turn on. I was getting all kinds of confusion when it was off (don’t as me why). I don’t use Bluetooth but expect that the connection at startup might be more consistent given my experience with headphones. Zwift on the other hand handle, the sensor connections are part of game startup. If it doesn’t connect, it will not send you as an active player on game. The steps are different and you just have to adjust accordingly.
Addendum: I have done my best to minimize Ant+ drops/interference: 5 ghz to phone, differing channels for 2.4 ghz, extension cable for Ant+ sensor to the trainer, & hardwired to PC.
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I used RGT a few weeks ago for a little power meter believability test. The benefit of TR is that sometimes your gains are hard to believe so I cross reference my main PM with some P1 pedals I have which read pretty much the same. Normally I do this with zwift recording my powerbox and my garmin recording the P1. But as I’m RGT curious I thought I’d give it a go.
First thoughts while riding in RGT where the graphics weren’t great but I think I got used to them, I use a 4k apple tv. Then I started to get annoyed by the fact you can see (or not obviously) any up coming corners, unless you know the route. So I had no idea when to save some energy while braking and cornering other than waiting for the red power numbers. I was surprised at how low the numbers of other users were, I didn’t see anyone else in about 10 mins (minor i suppose but turns out I get more entertainment from the other users than I thought).
I downloaded the fit file from strava and uploaded to zwift power to compare the power traces. I noticed that my RGT file had a lot of missing power data (first screenshot purple line), I dont know if its due to the strava download as its not evident in the trainer road analysis for the file (second screenshot). Should be easy to find out where the problem is if I sat down and looked at it.
I mainly train with zwift and TR on my phone so any shift to RGT would possibly need another device unless I can use the RGT phone app in the background. Maybe I’ll test it in my next rest week.
No, it’s not Strava’s fault. Ride file from RGT are raw. If at any point you lose connection to the sensor or the server (in most cases), the ride file will skip that recording. The file will look something like 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 … 30, 31, 33, etc where each number represent the recording sequence, in seconds, with all information about you in the game such as position (x, y, & z), power, cadence, HR, speed, etc. You can verify this by looking at the file when uploaded to Golden Cheetah or WKO4. If the same file is uploaded to WKO4, it retains the raw data but all of the stats are massaged (gaps are filled). Golden Cheetah will not massage the data. This is different from smart recording where the device, Garmin headunit, stops recording when there are no sensor input (e.g coffee stop). I strongly believe it is happening in other applications (e.g. Zwift, TR, etc) but I do not have evidence and the gaps are just filled. When I look at a ride record with my Garmin in conjunction with RGT, I get slightly different dataset as Rx fails to the headunit are not synchronized and typically not all fails at the same time (strong indication of communication error). RGT is doing some of that on screen (I don’t see zeros very often on screen) but they not massaging the ride file.
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Glad I’m not the only one to notice. I am an over analysis type and get a little OTT on accuracy of data as much as I can, sometimes I know to step back but as long as I have reasonable grounds to believe data I’m ok e.g two PMs lining up within a couple of watts. Possible but unlikely these drift the same amount in the same direction over time.
I’ll probably record an RGT ride with my garmin connected to the same PM next time and see what differences I get for TSS and power curve. Any major difference is basically going to kill RGT for me for now. Which is a shame as the concept is good. Maybe they’ll fix it in the future.
I’ve liked the RGT idea for a while and support the need for a competitor to Zwift. I loved the just-riding-around graphics and physics and on the roads I have tried was delighted to see stuff and scenery I know. I’d not had any connection drops, and on a Macbook with the image quality set to medium there is no judder. It’s easy to set up. All for free so far too.
I raced on RGT for the first time last night, at a circuit I know from them olden days when we could race outside. First thing, the lag in response to efforts when in a group made it impossible to gauge and seemed almost random, you end up on the front, so ease off but then no-one comes past for 5 seconds when they surge past, and the whole thing yo-yos. The biggest problem though was on the 10% hill. The instructions it was sending to my TACX Neo bogged me down massively, needing my smallest gear (36x30, so not high) and I was getting what I can only describe a rear wheel slip.
I’m a bit disappointed as I wanted it to be really good. Maybe this is work in progress, but unless they get it right, quickly, people will just revert to Zwift and they’ll never get traction.
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check ‘feedback intensity’ (under slope setting) is set to 50% - RGT defaults to 100% whereas zwift’s ‘trainer difficulty’ defaults to 50%
100%. It’s work in progress and they seem to be punting out frequent updates, but (like TR beta programmes) they need the user numbers and feedback to know what’s working and what’s not. I still predominantly use zwift for racing and to accompany TR workouts but zwift desperately needs some healthy competition, especially in the racing space.
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Apple? Bluetooth? Seems users with that combination had some problem with the recent update which was quickly patched (screen) two days ago. Is you screen and mobile up to date? It also seems just with Zwift, Apple and Bluetooth combination is just more difficult to get right. I’m on Windows 10, Ant+, and android. Except for the problems I had in the initial setup, my Windows’ Bluetooth was turned off and that caused massive communication drops to the server, it has been very stable. They do need to work on the version check. Windows Store is not that great.
Looks like the data is still missing from RGT. Its has an effect on average power and TSS in my TR profile, training peaks seems to fix it so it closely matches what my garmin records. I imagine its worse when doing real intervals on there too.
Import it into Golden Cheetah. Select, Edit, Fix Gaps in recording. Export then import to TR.
This is a good video on RGT racing / events - Find RGT Rides, Races, Routes, and Results w/ RGTDB.com - YouTube
The longer term plan sounds interesting - a ranking system to get your place in a category.
Just done my first ride on RGT Cycling - thought it was awesome. Better interface, better game physics, no ride-ons! Premium is an absolute bargain at £6.99 p/m. Can’t believe more people aren’t using it tbh.
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I play around in RGT. Certain courses lend themselves to time trial or interval workouts. For instance last time on Borrego I ended up in a group of three and each spent as long on the front as you wanted, then you could ease up and tuck behind the others at lower wattage, then repeat.
Then some of the others you’d get a solid hill climb effort. So you could practice pacing long efforts without focusing on the time or power numbers. You just went off effort enjoy the scene in front and see how you get on.
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I tried RGT and thought the magic roads feature was cool and did one group ride. I have to say the physics and realism are better than Zwift. I have not subscribed though as I have a bunch of people I ride with via meetup on Zwift still.
It’s excellent, I’m on Windows and Android, I never get dropouts mid ride, ever. I’ve built and imported a whole ton of roads to ride, people use my roads for races, I create erg files and do TrainerRoad sessions on there, I run RGT and TrainerRoad simultaneously and do sessions direct from TrainerRoad while riding up Ventoux, i do races and once you learn how to position yourself on the road It’s a superb experience.
I’ve never had Z but there are many many people on RGT now who are saying they will not go back. Love it.
I think there’s generally more of a challenge with apple than windows/android combo on both platforms. Also Ant+ seems to be more robust than BLE (which apple don’t support). The chorus on FB definitely reflects it. Having a stable internet is a must for RGT whereas Zwift only need it on startup for authentication.
The ride feel and magic road won me over.
I generally prefer RGT to Zwift these days. The only thing that keeps my Zwift subscription going is the number of races to choose from at any one time, but I expect RGT will keep offering more racing as it grows.
It’s easy to over race online. I think RGT has enough races right now for the number of people who want to race.
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