- The dungeon framerate reports were right about the mechanism: the cost is
CPU-side and it scales with NPC count, not with what's drawn. Two per-unit
lanes were each 30–100x more expensive than the work they do. Measured at the
reported Lower Blackrock Spire spot: 29.7 ms/frame, 72 CPU ms, before.
- "Which room is this NPC in" scanned whole dungeon groups triangle by
triangle — a spire stacks several 15k-face groups into any vertical column,
so 37 moving NPCs cost 1.2 million triangle tests per frame. Each group's
faces now sit in a column index built at load; same verdicts (pinned by
exactness tests), 88k tests, the lane drops from 11.3 ms to 1.1 ms.
- Animating one creature cost ~190 microseconds per frame in generic per-bone
animation machinery — hash lookups and boxed curves per bone, mostly to
produce constants. A direct pose evaluator now does the same math into the
same joints for ~16 microseconds per rig, checked bone-for-bone against the
old output across crossfades, overlays and masks. The reference animates
every in-range unit with no view cull, and now so can we: a raid's worth of
animating rigs (~450) costs ~4 CPU ms where it used to cost ~85.
- Net at the reported spot: a flat 60 fps. The performance probes also learned
to report CPU work (ms and %) instead of wall-clock fps, which is what makes
these numbers repeatable on a busy machine — and comparable to the Mac
report's own units.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
