Drawing into texture memory

Is there a way to draw into a memory buffer and then render this buffer as a texture? (I mean NOT to draw to screen and then copy it to texture memory)

You can’t render to a buffer you have allocated on your own. But you can always render to the back buffer, and copy the texture from there instead. Won’t show up on your screen then.

Unless your OpenGL implementation supports pbuffers right? Most newer 3D cards do support rendering to textures via Direct3D. Would be nice to have this ability in OpenGL soon.

Yeah, the pbuffer, but really, does any consumer level card support this today? Only heard nVidia is planning to code them.