After my prior investigation into SD card performance, I wondered if shooting JPEG instead of RAW would make a meaningful difference on both “buffer capacity” and write rates. What I found was rather interesting, for many reasons. All the following use “JPEG Fine” except where otherwise stated. At ISO 100, with noise reduction & distortion… Read more
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why two out of three IBOutlet-connected properties were being connected just fine, but a third wasn’t. What was different? Long story short: One was “(weak)”, meaning implicitly readwrite. Apparently when I added that one I got it right accidentally. One was “(weak, readonly)” and yet still worked.… Read more
SanDisk Ultra 32 GB vs Lexar Professional 600x 32 GB. On paper the Lexar is at least twice as fast for writes, thrice as fast for reads. Test setup: Nikon 55-300 @ 55/4.5 switched to manual focus (and slightly out of focus), VR on, in Program mode in a dimly lit room, framed roughly the… Read more
In the J3 & S1‘s favour: In the V1‘s favour: Other notes of interest: These new additions are odd, to me. No flash. At all. That’s just weird. Compact cameras live and die on the quality of their night photos, and it’s hard to see where else Nikon is going with the Nikon 1 line… Read more
In the D5200‘s favour (in roughly decreasing order of importance): In the D3200‘s favour: In neither’s favour: Other notes of interest: What’s not known yet: Update: Nikon have stated it’s an “all new” sensor, from Toshiba (as opposed to the Sony sensor in the D3200). So it could be interesting. There’s no particular reason to believe it’s… Read more
Note: Since writing this originally I’ve figured out how to get at least some aspects of shaders working. I’m still trying to flesh out the rest. I’ll post an update or revised entry at some point. Ugh. SceneKit supports shaders, technically. But it’s almost unequivocally unusable. Let me count the reasons: It doesn’t support geometry shaders… Read more
In a current project I’m drawing hundreds of spheres, of varying sizes. I discovered at one point that with them all in view simultaneously, performance was very bad (<10 FPS on my 6970M). Trial and error revealed that changing the geometry complexity – by changing the segment count of my spheres – made a huge difference.… Read more