Mattan Mohel

Hello, I'm still really new to Max and trying to get a handle on textures. 

I'm generating a texture (for Conway's game of life), processing it in a jit.gl.pix with a codeblock, and storing it in a zl.reg object. I want to iterate the texture and count how many of the pixels are 'alive' at any given moment. How would I go about doing this?

Hello, I'm still really new to Max and trying to get a handle on textures. 

I'm generating a texture (for Conway's game of life),...

analyzing-textures

Since you're implementing Conway's game of life on the GPU, efficiently counting the number of alive cells is not trivial. To get their number, you have to read back the texture to the CPU and use an object like cv.jit.sum from the cv.jit package (assuming you're using 1 to represent alive cells and 0 for dead ones); the readback can happen using a jit.matrix or, better, jit.gl.asyncread. Here's an example:

This method works decently for small/medium-sized textures, but if you need larger textures or a more efficient solution overall, you can try a custom geometry shader that computes the sum on the GPU directly. Still, the readback is unavoidable, but it happens on a 1x1 texture, therefore it's pretty fast. Here's an example:

Couldn't shader and transform feedback be a way to not completely reading back on cpu here? 

Analyzing Textures