Plan section 5.5.19, the V7 slice row, two rows in the section 5.1 uncovered
table, and one divergence-register row. No product code changes.
WHAT V7 TURNED OUT TO BE. Three of V6m's four numbers were taken through an
instrument that was not holding the world still. The route pinned the Dereth
clock by pressing AcdreamCycleTimeOfDay, whose mechanism is the transient
/time override that SyncFromServer clears -- so ACE un-pinned it seconds into
every run this campaign has taken. Two captures 45 s apart at ONE stop on ONE
backend differ in 22.3% of the frame because the sun keeps moving. Pinning it
(commit 2) took the interior stop from 12.16% to 0.78% on its own.
THE THREE LEADS, ANSWERED.
Lead 3 was WRONG and the section says so. V6m recorded the interior stop as a
route defect on the theory that the indoor spring-arm camera settles to different
distances in two runs. It does not. The interior was lit differently because the
sun had moved. With the sun held still the stop drops by a factor of fifteen and
its entire remaining difference map is the player character -- the EnvCell's
walls, floor, doorway and per-cell ambient are black. EnvCellRenderer's Vulkan arm
has its numeric pair, V6m's defect-list item 2 is discharged, and no route change
was needed or made.
Lead 2 is closed by pinning the cloud phase rather than masking the band, so the
gate keeps the sky under strict comparison.
Lead 1 is half fix, half finding. The residual was predominantly the anisotropy
gap (commit 1). What survives is one population -- dense alpha-blended distant
scenery -- and isolating it needed a better instrument than the connected route.
THE INSTRUMENT V7 RECOMMENDS FORWARD. An offline GL-versus-Vulkan pair, which is
just the two existing capture scripts run with ACDREAM_WORLD_TIME and
ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS set in the invoking shell. No session, no server, no
entities, no camera settle, no wandering NPCs, and unattended:
GL vs GL same commit (control) 1,966 px 2.13e-03
VK vs VK same commit (control) 1,039 px 1.13e-03
GL vs VK whole frame 28,807 px 3.13e-02
GL vs VK everything below the tree band (rows 280+) 497 px 8.82e-04
Terrain, blending, roads, the water edge, fog, statics, scenery below the horizon
and the entire retained UI are at parity, inside the campaign's 0.001 threshold.
AD-46, FILED WITH ITS REFUTATIONS RATHER THAN ITS THEORY. The treeline band is an
anisotropic tap-pattern divergence between AMD's GL and Vulkan drivers. Three
competing explanations were tested and refuted, and section 4.7's predicted class
is one of them:
- not a sub-pixel offset -- an integer shift search finds (0, 0);
- not sharpness or LOD scale -- high-frequency energy matches within 5%;
- NOT DEPTH PRECISION. Forcing the Vulkan viewport's window-depth range to
[0.5, 1.0], which reproduces GL's compressed mapping exactly, moved the
whole-frame number by 3% (28,807 -> 27,852). The experiment was reverted. The
one pre-approved divergence class is not what this is, and the row says so
rather than borrowing its approval.
- It IS anisotropy, and there is no knob left: 41,509 differing pixels in the
band at anisotropy 1, 22,266 at 16, which is GL's value and retail's.
THE VERDICT TABLE. Full route, both backends, tolerance 2, MSAA off, day group 0,
world time 0.5, sky phase 0 (artifacts/v7-diff-c2):
holtburg_town 26,330 px 2.86e-02 EXCEPTION -- phase + AD-46
facility_hub_interior 7,176 px 7.79e-03 EXCEPTION -- phase
aerlinthe_island 62,892 px 6.82e-02 EXCEPTION -- AD-46 + dark floor
No stop passes and none of the three exceptions is a renderer defect; each is
named individually in the section, because "phase" is not an excuse unless it is
specific. Aerlinthe's is partly the instrument rather than either renderer: the
scene's mean luminance is 28/255 and half its differing pixels are exactly delta
3, one step over a tolerance that is absolute rather than relative. Changing that
tolerance is not V7's call.
CARRIED FORWARD, recorded in the section 5.1 table and the V7 row: a passing
connected stop needs authored per-stop masks that the gate script does not have
(it still has only the global -MaskTopPixels, deliberately defaulted to 0); the
portal depth mask has now gone three slices without drawing a pixel in an
automated run, and HouseExitWalkReplayTests names the cheapest target for it
(the Holtburg corner building, cell 0xA9B40170); whether AD-46 is visible to a
human is a user-stop question nobody has asked yet; and the R6 soak and RenderDoc
capture on Vulkan were not run.
Gates for this commit: docs only, so the code gates of commits 1 and 2 stand.
Complete Release suite 9,195 passed / 5 skipped with zero failures, and the GL
connected repeat gate at 3/3 RENDERED on both the desktop witness and the client
capture, both taken at this tree.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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