A portrait in WoW is the character itself drawn small, not an image on
disk. The offscreen pass the character-select screen uses already frames a
face when zoomed fully in, so this keeps that pass running while in the
world and hands the result to the PlayerPortrait widget by name.
The model is rebuilt only when the appearance, facial features or equipment
actually change, so the common case is one render of an unchanged model
rather than a reload each frame. The texture is handed over every frame
rather than once, because the render target is recreated when the window
resizes and a stored handle would be stale.
Widgets can be looked up by name, which is how the client reaches a frame
FrameXML owns.