How to copy texture1 to texture2 efficiently?

Question

I want to copy texture1 to texture2. The most stupid way is copying tex1 data from GPU to CPU, and then copy CPU data to GPU. The stupid code is as below:

float *data = new float[width*height*4];
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex1);
glGetTexImage(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_FLOAT, data);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex2]);
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA32F, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_FLOAT, data);

As I know, it must exist a method that supports data copying from GPU tex to GPU tex without CPU involved. I consider about using FBO that rendering a tex1 quad to tex2. But somehow I think it is still naive. So what is the most efficient way to implement this?

Answer 1

If you have support for OpenGL 4.3, there is the straight-forward glCopyImageSubData for exactly this purpose:

glCopyImageSubData(tex1, GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 0, 0, 0,
                   tex2, GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 0, 0, 0,
                   width, height, 1);

Of course this requires the destination texture to already be allocated with an image of appropriate size and format (using a simple glTexImage2D(..., nullptr), or maybe even better glTexStorage2D if you have GL 4 anyway).

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If you don't have that, then rendering one texture into the other using an FBO might still be the best approach. In the end you don't even need to render the source texture. You can just attach both textures to an FBO and blit one color attachment over into the other using glBlitFramebuffer (core since OpenGL 3, or with GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit extension in 2.x, virtually anywhere where FBOs are in the first place):

glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo);
glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, 
                       GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex1, 0);
glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1, 
                       GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex2, 0);
glDrawBuffer(GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1);
glBlitFramebuffer(0, 0, width, height, 0, 0, width, height, 
                  GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT, GL_NEAREST);

Of course if you do that multiple times, it might be a good idea to keep this FBO alive. And likewise this also requires the destination texture image to have the appropriate size and format beforehand. Or you could also use Michael's suggestion of only attaching the source texture to the FBO and doing a good old glCopyTex(Sub)Image2D into the destination texture. Needs to be evaluated which performs better (if any).

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And if you don't even have that one, then you could still use your approach of reading one texture and writing that data into the other. But instead of using the CPU memory as temporary buffer, use a pixel buffer object (PBO) (core since OpenGL 2.1). You will still have an additional copy, but at least that will (or is likely to be) a GPU-GPU copy.