Inspecting sampler states

Overview

The Metal debugger allows you to inspect a sampler state with the Sampler State viewer. After opening a sampler state, you can view its associated properties and preview the sampling behavior. For more information, see Inspecting the bound resources for a command or Analyzing memory usage.

Navigate your sampler state

The Sampler State viewer shows the properties of your sampler state on the left (as configured by MTLSamplerDescriptor) and a preview on the right. The preview illustrates how pixels in a texture appear when using your sampler state.

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The square region in the center of the preview corresponds to UV coordinates within the range of 0.0 to 1.0.

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You can use the preview to quickly verify the configuration for your sampler state. For example, if you want a texture to mirror, but it’s drawing a constant value instead, you can check the sampler state. In the screenshot below, the sampler state is configured to clamp to a border color that’s opaque black, rather than using mirror repeat as the address mode:

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Try various combinations

The properties you configure when creating a sampler state determine how a texture looks when sampling it. The properties related to filtering control how pixels combine when the sample footprint is either larger or smaller than a pixel, or when it’s between mipmap levels. The address mode determines the texture coordinate at each pixel when a read falls outside the bounds of a texture. You can try using different combinations of filtering and addressing modes until you achieve your desired look.

See Also

Metal resource inspection

• Inspecting acceleration structures
• Inspecting buffers
• Inspecting pipeline states
• Inspecting shaders
• Inspecting textures