reading back

The main problems with render target readback are bandwidth, and stalling. Generally PCI-e/AGP bandwidth for reading back data is limited, so reading back large render targets can be slow. Downscaling to a smaller size can help a lot. Stalling occurs because the CPU and GPU have to synchronize, and then the GPU has to flush all commands so that the render target actually has the data you want. You can avoid the stall by triple-buffering your render target, as long as having 2 frames of latency is acceptable.