Are pbuffers really useless?

Im using the latest nVidia drivers and I question the value of pbuffers when I can’t seem to use them without my framerate dropping to 5fps.

In my case I need to switch render contexts from the main context to pbuffer1, then to pbuffer2, then back to the main context.

With these four switches my game becomes unusable(<5fps from 30fps). Is there anything I can do about this or are pbuffers truely useless in realtime apps?

I can just force none of the dynamic texture effects to work unless your screen resolution is high enough but this seems like a real issue since my game is mostly fill rate limited.

you don’t need separate contexts actually…

and yes, in the current design, the whole pixelformat and pbuffer thing is quite useless for me, as it is nonportable to other platforms… os-specific extensions… stupid…

and the whole floatingpoint buffers and textures are based on it… ohwell, gl lost its strength… the platformindependence…

but gl2 will change it back again