Sharpness and the D850

Recently I switched from a 12 MP Nikon D700 to the 46 MP Nikon D850. Along with the 4 times increase in resolution come new challenges. An obvious one is lens sharpness – you’ll be surprised how many “sharp” lenses aren’t that sharp on the D850.

Yet, soft lenses are the least of the problems. If you want to have reasonably sharp photos, you will have to hone your technical photography skills. For any kind of landscape work, the tripod will become your best friend. But often enough you may just want to grab your camera and take photos. Continue reading “Sharpness and the D850”

Impact of Spectre and Meltdown Protection on Virtual Machine Performance

A year ago I wrote about the 2D graphics performance impact of the Windows 10 (1803) update inside a virtual machine. As it turned out, the performance impact was related to the Spectre vulnerability patch that Microsoft had introduced. However, the same patch had practically no performance impact on a Windows 10 bare-metal installation.

Time has passed and I wanted to see if there has been any progress. Right now I’m running Windows 10 (1903) with Nvidia driver release 431.36. Windows 10 is up-to-date, Nvidia however already offers a newer version (431.60).

Continue reading “Impact of Spectre and Meltdown Protection on Virtual Machine Performance”