Thought i would give a review of RGT. In case you do not know RGT is a competitor with Zwift in that it offers a virtual world for riding. That is probably where the similarity ends though. While RGT does have virtual rides all the rides (so far as i know) are based on real roads in the real world using real (as close as possible) physics, really just better physics meaning you cannot cruise down a hairpin turn at 70kph. your cartoon guy will hit the breaks to prevent you from flying over a guard rail. There are no made up roads like Zwift's Watopia.
I rode yesterday and today. Yesterday was a ride in Spain and today a very flat course in S. Cali.
RGT requires both a monitor and a smart phone app. the monitor is just that, a monitor only and is not interactive as far as i can tell. Everything is done through the smart phone app. below is a screen shot from the Spain ride. There were not many riders on the route, too bad. the course was about 14 miles long and the entire profile is what you see at the bottom of the screen along with a colored gradient which is really nice. I am about 1/4 through just heading up the first climb. The other white dots are the other riders and from what i could tell only riders heading in the same direction were shown here. In all there were more bots than real riders but i was happy to have the bots too as they gave me some incentive to turn up the juice to catch up. I never could catch up to "Vanessa," the next rider ahead of me. There were maybe 8 other real riders i encountered either in the same direction or in the reverse direction. In the top right corner the flag is me too. always in the middle, white pins are others in my direction and the grey ones heading toward me. Look at that, distance completed and distance remaining. nice!
Image quality was quite good, even on my crappy laptop. the best i ever got was 11 FPS and the worst was 6 FPS. the entire range was acceptable but i can't wait to see what it is like on a more modern PC. Colors were vibrant and it was always day time with no rain. I never understood why there is a night and rain in Zwift. Who wants to ride in that?
It took me a while to catch on but when approaching turns i noticed that my power output indicator at top left became red. I later made the connection that this is where my virtual self was hitting the brakes keeping me on the road. that meant that i could stop peddling or at least reduce my output power like in reality.
The Spain ride was beautiful, the scenery was much like reality based on my flyover in google maps. It reminded me of some rides here near Reno, NV, even my daughter picked up on that.
I ran this on a windows machine and it looks like Win10 is the minimum here. It is an app and not a regular application. Starting it is OK (i am a Win7 user and a Win10 novice) but ending it...i cannot find a close button so i am killing it. not sure if this is an RGT problem or just the way Win10 apps are like.
The smart phone app needs some work i think (low model Samsung phone). when moving from some screens there is no back button so i found myself going back "home" and starting from there. It probably just takes some getting used to. no overhead map, that would have been a nice feature.
The other ride i did was one in South California west of the Salton sea. This is a short course meant for laps and there were many more real riders here, maybe 20 or so and few bots.
I was able to get my Kicker, cadence monitor, and heart rate monitor connected, not sure if it was over Bluetooth or ANT+. cadence monitor lost its connection just seconds after getting it paired so connected again and all remained connected during both rides. funny thing is that this happened for both rides.
These two rides are completely free for others to ride, all that is needed is an account. i opened my account months ago and do not remember needing a credit card to get started, otherwise i would not have. Missing is the social aspect, the huge number of riders, the ride-ons, the ability to follow someone or be followed. RGT needs a user base but none of that stuff i just mentioned. riding the rides nearly devoid of other riders made the ride more like how i ride in real life anyway. a premium membership is $10/month. when zwift ends for me i will very likely be moving to this platform because of the number of real (virtual) rides that are available. and then there are the magic roads, a whole other topic.
https://www.rgtcycling.com/