interface GenerationCost

Timing for the CPU half of a patch, measured rather than budgeted.

The rate is not constant across levels, which is a property of the field rather than of the loop: a level-12 patch's 4,761 samples are clustered inside a handful of the noise's lattice cells, and a level-1 patch's land in a different cell every time. Measured on the same body and the same grid, 14.33 ms at level 12 against 20.69 ms at level 1 — 0.33 against 0.23 M samples per second for identical work.

The 3×3 window never saw this, because it only ever generated patches at the camera's own level. A whole-disk selection generates the coarse shell too, so the figure a descent reports is a mixed-level average and is the honest one for the streamer.

devtools/src/descent.ts:304