It is possible to obtain DVI output from pdfTeX. This DVI output should be identical to that of TeX, unless pdfTeX's extra microtypography features have been activated. Moreover, since LaTeX, ConTeXt et al. are simply macro packages for TeX, they work equally well with pdfTeX. Hence, pdflatex, for example, calls the pdfTeX program using the standard LaTeX macros to typeset LaTeX documents, whereas it is the default rendering engine for ConTeXt documents.
