KillerKlient

Ah! I didn't actually notice that but now that you say it, I can see that some of the towers do appear to have lit up windows. Interesting, guess that could be a very simple adjustment.

Check the latest post, somewhere in there they mention how they are trying to rapidly get more people access to the tech alpha and they will update on tech alpha recruitment next week, seems like they bought that forward a whole month unless I am mistaken. Which is great news if I understand correctly.

Sorry I didn't realise there was a time limit before we can give constructive feedback. How long have you decided this time limit should be?

We are, the whole point is to give feedback. MS probably views threads like these and they like feedback. If we all just sat here saying it's 100% amazing, then it's not going to help shape a better product. If enough people agree on how certain aspects could be tweaked then I'm sure MS will focus on them.

Ye I know, but my point is not a single light on the sky scrapers is turned on. In reality there would be a decent amount of them on in big cities (would expect half of them at least). Doesn't matter how well it is shown, but they need to be on!

Really nice work MS, love it. They thought of doing things that I wouldn't even expect. My only small bug bear is, this night photo: The Sky Scrappers on the left appear to be suffering from a power cut? Should be lit up like christmas trees in reality! Hope this is just a pre-alpha thing. See below for comparison sake.

I already explained this in a previous post, by saying you are invited, you are not releasing any more information that Microsoft has already released. As MS has already publically announced the dates of recruitment. So there is absolutely nothing wrong with people saying if they are invited or not, as long as they don't go into further details of their next steps etc. EDIT: MS seems to have fast tracked tech alpha 2 since they are giving another update next week about it? Seems like good news for the ones that didn't get invited this time around.

True. I haven't been invited, running a pretty old rig now: i7-3770K, 16GB DDR3, GTX 1060.

Intriguing, but still nVidia. Guess we know which graphics drivers are gonna work best lol.

So it seems quite clear for me what Microsoft's criteria is, based on everyone who has shared their specs. They have a high end nVidia GPU. That is 80 or 80 Ti, i.e. 980, 980 Ti, 1080, 1080 Ti, 2080, 2080 Ti. Have not seen any GPU's lower than that or even AMD GPU's. Don't think internet connection matters in this case.

Specs?

What are your PC specs if I may ask?

Link?

Darn I read this and thought it was real for a second. I hate you 😞

How do you know?

😂 I dunno, I think they are leaving their homework pretty late lol. I think it's gonna be a very limited release and most of the people they decided to invite probably would have been invited already.

Still no invite for me.

Rob may as well have just said it out loud lol. His post makes it almost concrete that PMDG are partners. Not having the authority to say? He's the boss man! That can only mean MS is stopping him.

I guess Microsoft's idea of inviting people for tech alpha 1 involves finding some poor old bloke running an old 9800 GT in the middle of Antartica on a 1 Mbps satellite internet connection. Lucky b*****d. 😂

A Geforce GTX 970? Yes a 4K monitor will work with that, it will just allow you to view things in higher resolution (which means more pixels = more detail). But it comes at the cost of using more VRAM on your GPU's memory and the extra processing meaning you get less FPS, so you may end up with a very laggy experience in some games at that resolution - I am sure MSFS2020 would be one of them. But still, you'll be able to enjoy Netflix in glorious 4K 🙂 and you can always play games in a lower resolution on your 4K monitor.

Alpha testing is normally done internally, usually quicker and easier to do it that way as it's an earlier stage and it takes a lot of effort to get public involvement. Beta testing is done in a production environment so when everything is pretty much ready to go but you want to iron out many bugs before "official" release.

It's not that simple, back in the days games just didn't do a lot of multithreading so you would see high CPU usage on a limited number of cores. It takes extra effort to make your code use more cores and a lot of new games these days actually have started to take advantage of that. But the problem is, it's not a simple thing to implement. There is no on/off switch, it has to be done throughout the code and so there will always be places in the code where multi core use simply does not happen, because some tasks just cannot be split into multiple threads, others are too big or complex to split and in some cases it may just not be worth the effort to make the code that way. That's why it starts to become a bit pointless when you have 12 cores and 24 threads, because the reality is that the big tasks (especially in gaming) will still be limited to single cores and adding more cores won't make a difference. CPU's like the threadripper are designed for doing many many many small jobs that can very easily be split into multiple parallel tasks. With gaming it is much much much more complex. EDIT: A very abstract and simple example is, if you had a program that simply counts to 5 and you made it multithreaded, with each thread counting + 1, then you can have a max of 5 threads doing that work. If your CPU has 24 threads, you have 19 going to waste and you would have wasted valuable processing time splitting such a simple task across 5 threads when it would have been quicker to run it on one thread and not spend time splitting it up. Games have many small functions that have problems like this - this is just one simple example, there are many other problems like this.

Microsoft did say that their plan is to eventually have everyone who signed up to be involved in at least one of the technical alphas. The chances of that being the very first one is unlikely I guess, although we all want it to be :P.

Threadripper is not really designed for gaming. If you want a top end AMD CPU for gaming then go for a Ryzen 7. The Ryzen 9 will work too, but the extra cores won't be utilised that well in most if not all games so a bit pointless. At the moment AMD is ahead of Intel when it comes to CPU's, I've always had Intel CPU's since I've been alive. But if I was building a PC now, I would definitely go for a Ryzen 9 (just because I have the money to burn over a Ryzen 7).

4k 60fps is not the same as 4k 144fps. 60 fps is pretty rubbish in some games, I play a lot of first person shooters games and can't stand to play on lower FPS. Most "gaming" monitors are 144 fps these days and in my opinion that is the target FPS you want your GPU to be able to achieve.