Fast acess pbuffer or texture?

I have rendered some geometry information (norm, location) into pbuffer, then bind it to texture.

Are there any methods I can directly access the pbuffer or texture content in my code other than sampler in fragment shader? (For my program’s logical sequence depends on the information).

I have got the texture coordinate information, and anyway “glGetTexImage” may be a solution. Are there any other faster APIs?

Thanks in advance!

glGetTexImage is the way that comes to mind to transfer texture data to system memory. Be aware however, that this may come at a noticeable performance cost.
If you need to do it that way, it may even be faster to render to the back buffer and use glReadPixels - that would save you the context switch to render to the pbuffer.
On a side note, when superbuffers arrive, problems like these are finally supposed to be solvable at decent performance. I sure hope that the ARB has noticed how big the demand for this is, and how important superbuffer functionality actually is

Superbuffers spec is in development by the ARB. A group works on it. Look at the ARB meeting notes.

I have noticed that glGetTexImage doesn’t work right for cubemaps on ATI and if you want speed avoid reading back anything from the server side. If it’s a 2D tex, then it’s fine on NV and ATI.

There is basically 2 ways to read back :
ReadPixels
GetTexImage

but GetTexImage might perform worst because it’s part of the API that is ignored.