fix #225: stabilize render pacing and frame CPU

Replace scheduler-quantized software sleeps with a reusable Windows high-resolution deadline timer, expose pacing in the frame profiler, and make shutdown wake every persistent mesh worker without losing the shared signal.

Preserve retail alpha order while using a stable radix, skip duplicate deferred-alpha SSBO packing, pack light sets, cache static selection descriptors, and retire historical material groups at the whole-frame boundary. The fixed dense-Caul sample improved from roughly 9-12 ms CPU to 5.3-6.2 ms without reducing visual quality.

Release build succeeds with zero warnings and all 6,300 tests pass with five intentional skips. Three independent retail, architecture, and adversarial reviews are clean; the post-review connected route remains pending because local ACE is offline.

Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>

docs/plans/2026-04-11-roadmap.md

@@ -562,6 +562,7 @@ behavior. Estimated 17–26 days focused work, 3–5 weeks calendar.
 - **Missile/portal VFX campaign Step 9 automated hardening implemented and independently reviewed 2026-07-14; final two-client visual gate pending.** A deterministic 96-owner App fixture drives canonical missiles and effect owners through projectile updates, repeated DAT-effect scheduling, loaded↔pending↔loaded landblock churn, light/particle withdrawal and recovery, accepted deletes, same-GUID generation reuse, never-created F754 queues, and session reset. It asserts balanced logical render registration and zero residual records/bodies/projectiles, spatial buckets/rescues, shadows (including suspended registrations), effect profiles/packets, PhysicsScript FIFOs/anchors/delayed calls, particle bindings/logical IDs/render-pass owners, poses, light-controller/sink/manager owners, and stale record component references. A companion twelve-cycle gate drives exact recall motion `0x10000153` through AnimationSequencer/CallPES, Hidden, deferred remote placement, hydration, and UnHide; a second 96-owner `EntitySpawnAdapter` gate balances actual mesh-adapter reference counts without GL. The pass fixed undrained persistent rescue retention, delayed stale visibility edges, GUID-scoped teardown, create resurrection after a nested delete/reset, non-atomic resource registration, double teardown from a re-entrant session-clear callback, observer failure stranding later visibility edges, and stale outer projection transactions overwriting callback-created replacements. Teardown now removes exact projection references and generation/local-ID owners, uses per-GUID/session lifetime epochs plus per-record projection tokens, drains visibility fan-out before aggregating failures, and finishes or supersedes canonical commits before surfacing observer errors. Core remains GL/backend-free, panels remain on UI abstractions, and projectiles still draw through ordinary `WbDrawDispatcher` live-entity submission rather than a global projectile pass. AP-69 and TS-49 remain; AP-83/AP-91 now explicitly describe only a future mover that enables PerfectClip.
 
 - **Portal/resource lifetime correction 2026-07-18; connected stress gate passed, final visual gate pending.** `LiveEntityLivenessController` ports retail's 25-second leave-visibility destruction queue over canonical live records, cancels expiry for spatially resident or owned objects, and uses holtburger's conservative 384-unit envelope where ACE supplies no client-visible PVS leave event. The broader integration balances generation-scoped appearance/live/landblock/effect/UI/portal owners, bounds DAT/decoded/standalone/composite/atlas/mesh residency, performs incremental mesh-arena migration, and defers GL deletion or slot reuse through three frames of GPU fences. Render/UI scratch storage is reused with hysteretic trimming. No visual range or quality setting was reduced. The final seven-destination connected route cut peak working/private memory from 2,954.5/3,502.3 MiB to 1,493.4/1,969.5 MiB, returned Caul to 1,030.6/1,638.2 MiB, held 125–153 FPS locally through the final dwell, and produced no WER/driver reset. AP-69 is narrowed rather than retired because exact ObjCell PVS and explicit preview lifetimes remain.
+- **Render-thread CPU and high-refresh pacing correction 2026-07-19; automated/review gates passed, connected rerun pending.** Software pacing now uses one reusable Windows high-resolution waitable timer instead of scheduler-quantized `Thread.Sleep`; the permanent profiler attributes that wait as `pace`. Wb keeps exact stable far-to-near alpha order while using a radix key, avoids immediate SSBO packing for deferred transparent objects, packs each eight-light set, caches immutable selection descriptors, and retires historical material groups only after one complete unused frame across every landscape/dynamics/paperdoll draw scope. A fixed dense-Caul sample improved from roughly 9–12 ms CPU to 5.3–6.2 ms without reducing view distance, particles, textures, streaming radius, or other quality. The prior 141.8 FPS result remains scene-specific; local ACE was offline for the post-review connected rerun.
 
 **Reference docs:** `docs/research/retail-ui/00-master-synthesis.md` + slices 01-06. Every AC-specific behavior has a decompiled FUN_ / DAT_ citation.