Faster way to get raw texture data than Texture2D.ReadPixels?

Questions & Answers
1

I want to capture the screen the user is seen and send that data as a byte array to a remote machine, running another Unity3D application.

I am using Texture2D.GetRawTextureData() at present, but after timing it, I see that it takes up to 12 milliseconds:

private byte[] FrameData;
public IEnumerator SetFrame()
{
	// Can take up to 12 ms!
	yield return new WaitForEndOfFrame();

	int width = Screen.width;
	int height = Screen.height;

	Texture2D tex = new Texture2D(width, height, TextureFormat.RGB24, false);

	var sw = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();
	sw.Start();
	tex.ReadPixels(new Rect(0, 0, width, height), 0, 0);
    Debug.Log(sw.ElapsedMilliseconds.ToString());

	FrameData = tex.GetRawTextureData();
	Destroy(tex);
}

On this other machine, I do the following to display the image to the user:

void DisplayFrame(byte[] frame)
{
	//3ms at most
	Texture2D texture = new Texture2D(Screen.width, Screen.height, TextureFormat.RGB24, false);
	texture.LoadRawTextureData(frame);
	texture.Apply();
	GetComponent<Renderer>().material.mainTexture = texture;
}

Is there something faster than ReadPixels?

(PS how the hell do I insert a new line between sentences? This editor just ignores them!)

2

If you are working on 2018 you could use ( or try at least, as its still experimental ) AsyncGPUReadback.Request,
also take a look at this Real-Time Image Capture in Unity. How to capture video in C# without… | by Jeremy Cowles | Google Developers | Medium basically what you want to do is find a place where triggering gpu flush is the least expensive. Good Luck!