Drawing to renderTextures

[sodah]

Hey,

I am doing some simulations with autonomous agents that are controlled by an artificial neural network.
The input into the ANNs is the world rendered from their perspective i.e a renderTexture with a corresponding view.

Since i'm new to SFML i'm not sure how to do this in the fastest way possible.
My current way is just simply:

renderTexture.setView(...);
renderTexture.draw(...);
image = renderTexture.getTexture().copyToImage();
... feed pixels to ANN

Is there anyway to do this with better performance or do you have any better approach?

[eXpl0it3r]

Create the ANN as shader, then you don't need to go from VRAM to RAM. If you need the pixel data, that's the only way I currently know of.

[sodah]

If i did that i would still need to copy the output from the ANN to RAM to run my physics simulation but i guess it would be faster since there would be less stuff to copy.

Is there any way to render using the cpu in SFML? The textures i want to create for my agents are very small so it should be pretty quick with the cpu aswell. Or do you know any other libs where i could do this?