Question

I know how to do it the other way around. But how can I create a CIImage from a texture, without having to copy into CPU memory? [CIImage imageWithData]? CVOpenGLESTextureCache?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to avoid having to read back pixel data using glReadPixels(). All of the inputs for a CIImage (data, CGImageRef, CVPixelBufferRef) are CPU-side, so I don’t see a fast path to deliver that to a CIImage. It looks like your best alternative there would be to use glReadPixels() to pull in the raw RGBA data from your texture and send it into the CIImage using -initWithData:options: and an kCIFormatRGBA8 pixel format. (Update: 3/14/2012) On iOS 5.0, there is now a faster way to grab OpenGL ES frame data, using the new texture caches. I describe this in detail in this answer.

However, there might be another way to achieve what you want. If you simply want to apply filters on a texture for output to the screen, you might be able to use my GPUImage framework to do the processing. It already uses OpenGL ES 2.0 as the core of its rendering pipeline, with textures as the way that frames of images or video are passed from one filter to the next. It’s also much faster than Core Image, in my benchmarks.

You can supply your texture as an input here, so that it never has to touch the CPU. I don’t have a stock class for grabbing raw textures from OpenGL ES yet, but you can modify the code for one of the existing GPUImageOutput subclasses to use this as a source fairly easily. You can then chain filters on to that, and direct the output to the screen or to a still image. At some point, I’ll add a class for this kind of data source, but the project’s still fairly new.