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>
