Cost of switching render contexts

[Shiner]

Hi there,

Could anyone on the list tell me how expensive it
is to switch rendering contexts on a fairly modern graphics card. Is this OS dependent? I'm sure I read somewhere that modern cards now support more than one rendering context in hardware - can anybody give an idea of how many contexts modern hardware supports and what happens to your performance if you
start switching rapidly between many (around a dozen) context at a high frequency.

Thanks
Shiner

[azazello]

try to find a demo with a EXT_framebuffer_object and a PBuffer(i.e. without and with context switch). It is not really clear calculation of context switching(becouse EXT_framebuffer_object also require some time), but can give a point for future investigation.