I need to grab the screen pixels into a texture to perform post processing. Previously, i have been using BlitCommandEncoder to copy from texture to texture. Source texture being the MTLDrawable texture, onto my destination texture. They both have the same MTLPixelFormatBGRA8Unorm so everything works just fine.
However, now i need to use a frame buffer color attachment texture of MTLPixelFormatRGBA16Float for HDR rendering. So, when i am grabbing the screen pixels, i am actually grabbing from this color attachment texture instead of the Drawable texture. And i am getting this error:
[MTLDebugBlitCommandEncoder internalValidateCopyFromTexture:sourceSlice:sourceLevel:sourceOrigin:sourceSize:toTexture:destinationSlice:destinationLevel:destinationOrigin:options:]:447: failed assertion [sourceTexture pixelFormat](MTLPixelFormatRGBA16Float) must equal [destinationTexture pixelFormat](MTLPixelFormatBGRA8Unorm)
I don't think i need to change my destination texture to RGBA16Float format? Because that will take up double the memory. One full screen texture (color attachment) with that format should be enough for HDR to work right?
Is there other method to successfully perform this kind of copy? On openGL there is no error when copying with glCopyTexImage2D
Metal automatically converts from source to destination format during rendering. So you could just do a no-op rendering pass to perform the conversion.
Alternatively, if you want to avoid boilerplate no-op rendering code, you can use the MPSImageConversion performance shader that's basically doing the same.