Let clarity's base be computed where it is still fully determined

Clarity's Gaussian sigma is 1.2% of the frame's shorter edge, so its radius
is a property of the viewport: 52 render pixels at 4K, two separable passes
of 105 taps each over 8.3 M pixels. That measured 33.9 ms — seven times the
entire fused point chain, for one slider — and is docs/technical-debt.md TD-4.

A detail pass may now declare `output_scale`, and clarity's base is computed
on a grid a quarter the size on each axis.

The pass that combines needs the blur *and* the full-resolution colour, and a
colour that has been through a quarter-scale target is no longer full
resolution. So a scaled pass cannot simply join the ping-pong: there are two
chains now. The full-resolution one carries the colour and no scaled pass
touches it; the reduced one carries the base and reaches the combining pass
through a second binding as `reduced_at()`.

The reduce is a dispatch of its own rather than something the first blur half
does on the way past, and that is the whole difference between this and the
strided kernel the module documentation rules out. A stride samples an image
that is not band-limited and aliases high-frequency content down into the
base, which is then subtracted, and arrives in the output as mottling across
smooth gradients. This band-limits first and samples after. What is discarded
is content the base could not represent at any resolution, because a Gaussian
at sigma = 26 px holds nothing above one cycle per 26 px and the quarter-scale
grid carries one per 8 — so the reduced base is not an approximation of the
full-resolution one, it is the same function sampled where it is still
determined.

Which is also why the scale belongs to the band rather than to the stage.
Texture's sigma is a decade finer, so the reduce pass's own box would be wider
than the Gaussian it was prefiltering; texture never reduces. And clarity
steps 4 -> 2 -> 1 as sigma falls, because a quarter of a small sigma is not a
Gaussian either — the case that gives up is the one that was already cheap.

`radius` stays in each pass's own pixels and `ComposedDetail::radius` multiplies
it back up, so 13 reduced pixels at scale 4 still report the 52 render pixels a
tile would have to be grown by. The halo a scheduler sees does not move.

The halo tests pass unchanged, which was TD-4's stated bar; they render at
1024 px and so exercise the reduced path rather than stepping around it. Added
`crossing_the_reduction_threshold_does_not_change_the_picture`, because
nothing yet compared the reduced form against a *less* reduced one — every
other test measures one form against itself. It renders the same edit either
side of the 4 -> 2 step-down and holds the peak excursion to 0.03 stops and
the reach to 2% of the frame.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-29 13:12:29 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 0407fb8d2d
commit bff95e25ad
10 changed files with 833 additions and 82 deletions
+1
View File
@@ -67,6 +67,7 @@ fn main(@builtin(global_invocation_id) gid: vec3<u32>) {
.to_string();
ComposedDetailPass {
output_scale: 1,
label: "test/instances".to_string(),
source,
uniforms: vec![SIZE as f32, SIZE as f32, 1.0, 0.0],