Rouvy or Zwift?

Recently I decided it was time to give another indoor riding environment a try. After 1,000 rides on Peloton and grinding through more than 40 levels of Zwift, I was beginning to feel like I had exhausted those platforms, and with so many options I wanted to try something new. Enter Rouvy (like Zwift, another product whose name is always auto-corrected into something else).

I’m a pretty enthusiastic Zwifter, having logged about 400 hours on the platform. I still enjoy it very much, but as is true for most games, eventually I had completed all the challenges and acquired all the stuff that the game has to offer, and most days are just more of the same (which is why I’m so excited when new routes are revealed!)

A month or so ago, I met a Rouvy fan, who could not speak highly enough about it and urged me to try it. So this week, rather than another mind-numbing set of loops around Fuego Flats, I downloaded the Rouvy app and decided to give it a try.

What Rouvy has to offer 

The thing that impressed me the most about Rouvy is how, in a lot of ways, it is the most realistic cycling simulator I’ve tried. No, there’s no braking and no turning (even through clicking a button on an app), so on that level it’s the same as Zwift, but the overall experience is much more like riding in the real world, and I’m not talking about the graphics. What I’m talking about is that things like distance, incline and decline feel more real in Rouvy.

Rouvy reveals that Zwift is the miniature golf of cycling

Riding a course in Rouvy really brings in to focus a feeling I’ve had about Zwift for a long time. Although I don’t have any data to suggest that a mile in the game is more or less the same as a mile in real life, it does seem odd that one can ride up a mountain, through foothills, a desert, and a beach all in a ride that takes less than an hour. To give an example, it takes about ten minutes to ride to the top of the volcano from sea level. According to some maps, the height of the volcano is about 125m above sea level (about 410 feet) and the course that ascends it is only 3.75 kilometers (2.3 miles) despite circling the volcano several times. This volcano is tiny.

Zwift is sort of the NFL Red Zone of cycling. It’s all highlights. It’s one thing after another. And absolutely there’s a place for that soft of thing. The constant variation is what makes it fun and because the graphics are very basic, Zwift can get pretty boring pretty fast if you’re not about to transition from the plains to the hills, or to the mountains, or whatever is just up ahead.

But real cycling is generally not so dramatic. It’s long stretches with relatively modest changes in incline. Depending, of course, on what route you select, there’s generally a decent wait between truly challenging sections, but because you are watching real video the rides manage to stay interesting even as you grind out some of the less dramatic miles.

Another key difference in the feel of Rouvy vs. Zwift is very noticeable for users of the Kickr Climb or Wahoo Bikes, and that is how they handle inclines and declines.

On Zwift, inclines and declines are presented only in whole percentages, and as a result, you are pretty much always aware of a pitch change while riding. Rouvy, however, presents incline as tenths of a percent, so it is very possible for a grade to change gradually over time without you ever really being aware of it. In fact, during my introductory ride (which has only gentle inclines and declines) I wasn’t sure that the bike’s incline feature was working at all. Now that I have a few Rouvy rides under my belt, the Zwift changes seem jarring and unnatural by comparison. (Well, they always felt unnatural, but I had nothing to compare to.)

Rouvy’s ride library

Rouvy has a fairly large set of curated rides available, from all around the world, and they are pretty fun to ride. I’ve noticed, though, that certain routes work better than others.

The least-good ride (I hesitate to call it the worst, because it wasn’t bad) I experienced was a ride through downtown Sydney, Australia. As you can imagine, there are some stoplights in downtown. Rouvy doesn’t actually make you stop at the stoplights, but the transitions that the video needs to make to account for this are a little jarring. Still better than having to actually stop, to be sure, but in a congested downtown, where you hit a lot of stoplights, it starts becoming something of a regular occurrence.

More in general, the videos work best when the camera car (and for the rides I’ve taken it does always seem to be a car) can travel at a constant speed. As you can imagine, the video playback speed increases or decreases based on your speed, but the algorithm really has its hands full when trying to sync to your bike and deal with managing the variable speeds of the videographer.

An aside here… it’s really mind bending to be riding Rouvy after so much Zwift. I can remember being in a ride and noticing how the roadside trees moved by faster than the distant mountains and thinking, “wow, they really nailed the motion parallax” before realizing that yeah, it’s just a video of trees and mountains so it should look realistic! Another crazy thing is riding and seeing another cyclist ahead, except that this cyclist was actually in the video and not part of the augmented reality overlay. As I do outdoors, I accelerated in order to tuck in behind this cyclist (there is drafting in Rouvy as there is in Zwift and IRL) before realizing that if I speed up, the cyclist ahead will, too. The question of whether I’d ever catch him is whether the person who shot the video caught him. If the videographer never overtook the cyclist, I would never do it, either, regardless of how hard I tried.

The most successful Rouvy videos are long, open roads where the camera car can maintain a constant speed and there are no cyclists in the video itself. Those are the conditions that show off Rouvy best.

Create your own rides with Rouvy and explore its limitations

The thing that really attracted me to Rouvy, though, was the potential for uploading my own rides. One thing that I learned from doing centuries and longer rides is that it is very useful to know what to expect. I think it would be terrific if I could upload the route of an upcoming event and pre-run it. To me, that would be Rouvy’s killer feature.

Unfortunately, it’s not really ready for prime time. I have high hopes that this will evolve over time, but there is, as my father would say every time I brought home my report card, “room for improvement”.

I tried two different user-created routes, one with video (which I did not create myself) and one without (which I did create myself). The route with video was fun to ride, as it went through a national park near where I live. I recognized the route and it was fun to ride on familiar roads.

It wasn’t perfect, though. For one thing, the elevation changes often didn’t truly sync with the video. Sometimes I would see myself ride up a short, steep grade but my bike didn’t elevate or get any harder to pedal. Then, five seconds after getting to the top, then the bike catches up. It’s a bit disorienting to experience. I don’t know if this is just a limitation of the available data (I’m not really clear on how the service actually syncs the video with the GPS data) or whether better data would have resulted in a better outcome.

The second user-generated route was one that I created myself. I don’t have a video camera, so this was a data-only route. In my research, I was aware that you could create your own route without video, but I couldn’t find anything on the web about what that experience is like. If you go this route (no pun intended), what you get is a Google Earth-like map with a line showing the route and a dot representing your progress. This actually worked pretty well for me because it was a route I knew very well. I knew the hills were coming and I think to my muscles it was probably a pretty good approximation of an actual ride. I’m not really sure how much I would enjoy a video-less ride over a route I was not familiar with. If it’s for pre-running a route that I am going to do in IRL, I suppose it’ll do the trick. Would be nice to have something like RGT’s Magic Roads, though. I’ll do a post about that soon.

Rouvy or Zwift?

Zwift. If I had to choose one, Zwift is clearly superior. I definitely enjoy doing longer rides on Rouvy and enjoying the scenery (though I was disappointed that the “Grand Canyon” ride I did this morning offered only one or two glimpses of the actual canyon). I like that elevation is graduated in tenths of a degree instead of entire degrees as they are in Zwift. In the end, though, I can’t see myself spending $15/month for the few things that Rouvy does better than Zwift. I certainly wish them the best, and will probably check back in a year or so from now and see how they’ve progressed.