I am using SCNTechnique in combination with ARSCNView. The technique is doing so minor post-processing. I have written several filter variant for this post-processing, but I'm facing an issue when with one of the filters/fragment shaders, SCNTechnique discards my output and just presents the plain camera feed on screen instead. This is clearly visible in the Metal pipeline, using the GPU frame debugger.
Let me stress that my setup works for 90% of my filters, but not this one and I want to know why.
iOS 18.1, iPhone 13 Mini. Xcode 16.1.
Encoder 0 & 1 are injected by the system. Render encoder 2 & 3 correspond to my SCNTechnique's render passes: one to manipulate pixel data (darken it in this case) and another to BLIT it back to the main texture. I know the separate buffer is not strictly for this particular operation, but it shouldn't matter. Note that the issue occurs in encoder 4 (not mine but ARKit's).
In Render Encoder 4,
scn_postprocess_AR_fragment handle my texture (#0, ending in f980) and another from the camera feed (Texture 2). I know this pass is typically used for grain because that's what it used to do before I disabled grain on ARSCNView (+ the buffer still contains grain paramaters).
I have other post-processing filters that work just fine. By what magic is ARKit determining to use Texture 2 instead of my Texture 0? Sure, I could keep digging into the minute differences between my shaders to find out which LoC affects how some ARKit shader down the line operates, but it's awfully opaque so far.