projected texture / static geometry

A little background. I have a large triangle mesh that is coplanar. I’d like to have the option of either projecting this mesh on a flat surface or a curved suface.

Can I render geometry (say a triangle mesh) into a texture, save that texture for later use, recall it as needed and ‘project’ it onto a surface thereby eleminating the need to ‘draw’ the triangle strips everytime? I’m trying to speed things up a little and it would seem that projecting a texture would be much faster than drawing the triangle mesh each and everytime (calling glDrawElements). I’ve been looking at the demo that Cass put out (http://www.r3.nu/~cass/projspot.zip) and it seems like it’s what I need. I know I’d need rebuild the texture if I minified/magnified, but, is my overall premise correct?