Linux offscreen capture (EGL/GLES pbuffer; llvmpipe in the sandbox) and an opt-in screen-space gate
for LOD>=3 (normal distance projected at each LOD's closest display distance, 1 px at 1440p =
0.61 mrad). The gate rejects the S13 octave-drop and stride-2 controls, fault injections, and a
vertical-vs-screen control. Finding: today's far meshes differ from the field by up to 92 px, and
LOD swaps snap mesa rims by tens of px (p50 0 px), a silhouette effect of plain LOD switching. The
octave cutoff was dropped: nothing qualified, and octaves are a small share of far time. Off-path
cost: reviewer interleaved W12 within noise vs L4 (+0.6% median). Hashes = L4.
Largest far lever measured: column work outside noise, 34% of far worker time (duplicate XY across tiles).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ED33VnqepD4YY6gDAAA832
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5.5
9898e057fd
