# Performance reference configuration

The machine-readable contract is
[`2026-07-24-performance-reference-configuration.json`](2026-07-24-performance-reference-configuration.json).
It fixes the reference CPU/GPU/driver/OS, graphical settings, routes, display
paths, screenshot rule, and re-baseline policy used by the Modern Runtime
Architecture plan.

Only the physical AMD display path is authoritative for frame-time, CPU, and
GPU acceptance gates. Remote Desktop runs are intentionally retained as a
separate diagnostic population: they validate the connected route, resource
lifetime, allocation attribution, and major regressions, but the 32 Hz remote
presentation path cannot establish maximum throughput.

The connected routes pin the client-only world-time override at noon. The
dense-town route uses ACE's canonical Arwic point-of-interest arrival and a
fixed six-second retail-input turn before its screenshot and checkpoint.

Screenshot comparison uses a per-channel tolerance of 2 and permits at most
0.1% differing unmasked pixels. Dynamic particles or similarly nondeterministic
pixels require an explicit same-resolution alpha mask; a failure is not
accepted by silently increasing the global tolerance.