Here's a simple scenario I've often had to do in order to render lines and points at a constant raster size: I need to modify pscale before providing geometry to the renderer by referencing a camera position, and then alter pscale by distance to camera. Throw in other attributes like brightness, etc..

Is it faster to make modifications like this in a SOP modify or natively with a wrangle in a LOP context?

While can't answer that, just want to mention that you can also potentially use Hengine Dynamic Payload which is new in H18.5 to let the change be computed when the payload is being loaded rather than during LOP execution,
(Essentially it's the sop import way, but delayed, not sure what are the hengine license implications though)

tamte
While can't answer that, just want to mention that you can also potentially use Hengine Dynamic Payload which is new in H18.5 to let the change be computed when the payload is being loaded rather than during LOP execution,
(Essentially it's the sop import way, but delayed, not sure what are the hengine license implications though)

It would have to be a self contained hda, or have the geometry it modifies passed as a file path parameter, as there's not a way to pass geometry on the stage to an hda payload.