Awesome! I have an SSAO shader that can use a better depth texture. Does it report in Intensity/Float format?

Are you reading the depth-buffer here, then?
Very impressive! I'd vote for the depth-buffer to be made accessible, definitely! (and have already)

Great stuff!!

a|x

Yeah, read as a Float single-channel image. Unfortunately, this crosses a few lines (CoreImage doesn't support single-channel images, so it's a bit confused, and QC still doesn't properly support them either, so this prints gl warnings in the console every frame when the depth texture is used in a core image filter [it tries to do some gl call that fails due to single-channelness] -- this harms performance).

Wait, QC specifically has A QCPluginPixelFormatF and I8 pixel formats? It does not support that?

It supports them for some operations (imageWithString outputs an intensity image, for example), but it doesn't consistently handle them like other images. Specifically, it doesn't seem to like the way we create them, and doesn't like us using them in CoreImage Filters (or something related to this composition) -- I'm still trying to hunt it down.

It looks like this: 1/18/09 8:41:23AM Quartz Composer[37161] *** OpenGL error 0x0502 (invalid operation) in function "-[QCImageTextureBuffer endRenderTextureAndFinish:]" (That's obviously not our code ;) -- though we might be mishandling something I guess. Like I said, still experimental, and this was a quick mock-up to see if performance was better than the old way.

[Correction: Just added some more sanity checks/cleanup, and it went away. Looks like some texture property wasn't preserved correctly in some cases. -- Guess it makes the cut in the next GLTools release :)]

A+, yes!

So, there will be some kind of way to "tune in" the actual focal point on the x/y/z, or it will be different?

There are 2 parameters: Focal Distance (how far from the camera the focal point is) and Focal Depth (how wide that in-focus region is). In real optics, this is a much more sophisticated and complex procedure, but what I've whipped up here is a simple approximation. This isn't necessarily general purpose, but it might be a sample composition just for kicks.

This is cool.