Detecting if a MTLTexture is blank - ios

Question

I am trying to determine if a MTLTexture (in bgra8Unorm format) is blank by calculating the sum of all the R G B and A components of each of its pixels.
This function intends to do this by adding adjacent floats in memory after a texture has been copied to a pointer. However I have determined that this function ends up returning false nomatter the MTLTexture given.
What is wrong with this function?
func anythingHere(_ texture: MTLTexture) -> Bool {
let width = texture.width
let height = texture.height
let bytesPerRow = width * 4
let data = UnsafeMutableRawPointer.allocate(bytes: bytesPerRow * height, alignedTo: 4)
defer {
data.deallocate(bytes: bytesPerRow * height, alignedTo: 4)
}
let region = MTLRegionMake2D(0, 0, width, height)
texture.getBytes(data, bytesPerRow: bytesPerRow, from: region, mipmapLevel: 0)
var bind = data.assumingMemoryBound(to: UInt8.self)
var sum:UInt8 = 0;
for i in 0..<width*height {
sum += bind.pointee
bind.advanced(by: 1)
}
return sum != 0
}

Answer 1

Matthijs' change is necessary, but there are also a couple of other issues with the correctness of this method.
You're actually only iterating over 1/4 of the pixels, since you're stepping byte-wise and the upper bound of your loop is width * height rather than bytesPerRow * height.
Additionally, computing the sum of the pixels doesn't really seem like what you want. You can save some work by returning true as soon as you encounter a non-zero value (if bind.pointee != 0).
(Incidentally, Swift's integer overflow protection will actually raise an exception if you accumulate a value greater than 255 into a UInt8. I suppose you could use a bigger integer, or disable overflow checking with sum = sum &+ bind.pointee, but again, breaking the loop on the first non-clear pixel will save some time and prevent false positives when the accumulator "rolls over" to exactly 0.)
Here's a version of your function that worked for me:
func anythingHere(_ texture: MTLTexture) -> Bool {
let width = texture.width
let height = texture.height
let bytesPerRow = width * 4
let data = UnsafeMutableRawPointer.allocate(byteCount: bytesPerRow * height, alignment: 4)
defer {
data.deallocate()
}
let region = MTLRegionMake2D(0, 0, width, height)
texture.getBytes(data, bytesPerRow: bytesPerRow, from: region, mipmapLevel: 0)
var bind = data.assumingMemoryBound(to: UInt8.self)
for _ in 0..<bytesPerRow * height {
if bind.pointee != 0 {
return true
}
bind = bind.advanced(by: 1)
}
return false
}
Keep in mind that on macOS, the default storageMode for textures is managed, which means their contents aren't automatically synchronized back to main memory when they're modified on the GPU. You must explicitly use a blit command encoder to sync the contents yourself:
let syncEncoder = buffer.makeBlitCommandEncoder()!
syncEncoder.synchronize(resource: texture)
syncEncoder.endEncoding()

Answer 2

Didn't look in detail at the rest of the code, but I think this,
bind.advanced(by: 1)
should be:
bind = bind.advanced(by: 1)