Fitting out a new training room in the house, I bought a cheap Acer box with i5, integrated graphics, and the potential (power, PCIe slot) to add a discrete GPU later if I ever feel like it. Something like 500 CAD. It works perfectly well. I prefer a desktop PC over a laptop because I like the idea of a big monitor on the wall, you can do any apps (Zwift, TR and Fulgaz are in there now) in combo plus streaming at the same time, and also do workout routines (stretching, core, etc) from anywhere in the room. Just works for me.
I must admit I fail to understand the need for super-high graphics power to run Zwift when it is fundamentally limited by their game engine and the ability of the app to manage large groups of riders anyway.
Not really…
I bought a TCL 43" 4k tv with integrated ROKU for 217 in 2019 @ sams club (mostly for my kids to play their video games). Its not great, but its a decent tv for the money.
The same TV (newer version, maybe?) is @ 289 now @ sams…
The more I’m thinking about it, I think I’m going to pick up a MacBook Air for my normal computer, and put my older MBP 2017 in the pain cave. It’s not great as a laptop, the keyboard doesn’t work great, the screen has dead pixels, and one of the speakers is blown, all of which would be fixed when used like a desktop. It’ll power the TV and monitor and has been running TR and Zwift thus far just fine. I also figured out that I can share it’s hard drive over my network, so I can share files pretty easily between the two laptops. And now that I realized I don’t need to power a 4K setup, it should do fine. Thanks to everybody for the suggestions.
Zwift likes high clock speed CPUs and it’s barely worth going over a 1660 Super on the GPU. Something like a 9400f (no inbuilt graphics) or 10400, paired with a 1660 (super or not) is more or less about as high as you need to go with Zwift. It’s incredibly poorly optimized and throwing RTX at it doesn’t really do anything anyway. Something like a 9400 and 1650 Super will get you pretty much max quality under your budget cap.
These three attached PDFs from the Zwift PC MR FB group contain an incredible wealth of information. It’s a great insight into how changing options affects performance. The Essentials doc has reccomended builds at different budgets.
I came across this comparison video of Zwift running on the M1 MacBook Air vs M1 MacBook Pro, the presenter seems pretty impressed with a frame rate in the 30-40s on the highest setting. I personally wouldn’t be able to stand that, I might just be spoiled.
The M1 works fine. It’s running at about 40 FPS in 4k. The Mac Mini is 800 bucks, a budget gaming PC generally starts around 900 to 1k and takes up more space while consuming considerably more power.
That’s pretty decent performance. I have the AppleTV4K, and it’s fine, but then I see screenshots from GPLama and I see Zwift is capable of so much more. When I started Zwift, it seemed like you needed to drop $1k+ to get the really good performance. My firstsetup was at like 720 and 10 frames per second or something. It was jumpy and blurry.
I looked at ebay yesterday, and there was an Alienware Alpha with keyboard and mouse for $150 start and $250 buy now. It closed with one bid and someone got it for the $150. I’m going to set up a search. Sure, my setup is working, but $200 to get 4k would be awesome.
Sorry, but the YouTube link is rubbish! At Ultra you should be seeing much higher resolution, including detailed shadows of the avatars. The clips of some reasonably small group rides were awful - stuttery and grainy.
Here’s a view of what Zwift looks like on the 4K setting. For this I’m using a gaming laptop with RTX2070 GPU. It looks pretty much the same with a GTX1050 on Ultra. The Ultra on the M1 looks awful in comparison.
Well thanks for that - I was perfectly happy with my gpx 1050 Ti performance but after you said it was “choppy” for you I put the log file into zwiftanalyser and you’re right, it does drop to 45fps in places
I think bang for buck it’s still pretty good though.
I just want to note how ridiculous it is that a 2016 era video card still sells for $250-300. Damn crypto mining is destroying the world, gaming, and high res Zwifting.
Strong disagree with a lot of the posts here. I’m a mostly Mac person but Zwift is a video game and if you want decent performance particularly in races a Windows PC is the way to go. Just build something cheap but get the best graphics card you can find / afford. For Zwift the video card is way more important than the processor, and the game works best with Nvidia cards.
Yea, my focus will be TR. I have done maybe 2 Zwift races ever. I want a decent/good experience, so not choppy or laggy, but I’m fine with 1080p and a decent FPS. I don’t really plan on racing Zwift, and the majority of the time it will be TR in erg mode with Zwift up just to pass the time. Occasionally, I like to do a full Zwift ride for some of the longer climbs like Ventoux of Alpe du Zwift. Maybe in the future I can pick up a more powerful machine, but we’ll see.
I’m a mostly Mac person but Zwift is a video game and if you want decent performance particularly in races a Windows PC is the way to go. Just build something cheap but get the best graphics card you can find / afford. For Zwift the video card is way more important than the processor, and the game works best with Nvidia cards.