Photometric lighting is orthogonal to HW accelerated ray tracing – they can be combined, but you could build a ray traced non-photometric renderer or a non-photometric ray-traced renderer.

The material model is the same, and it already has a reflection function _and_ color.
I expect we will ship a user settable brightness control but we are not going to set a user controllable gamma curve. Changing gamma is not a good proxy for brightness management.

1) will the photo metric rendering benefit from accelerated Ray-Tracing hardware rendering in new GPUs from AMD and Nvidia?

2) As far this topic is focused on rendering pipeline and promising on better clouds; how far can we relates with Austins recent mention of Next-Gen Scenery. i can understand the scenery will have better fresh looks under the new rendering pipeline, but what is the intent or definitions of next-gen scenery – apart from textures ) , would be happy to hear a bit on that.

Yes, I love Music too.

When you say ‘too big of a feature for a patch’ is the an uncommittal way of inferring something about Xplane 12?

We are running native/universal2 in the lab already. So it’s a question of when it becomes available, not if.

It doesn’t make as much a difference as you might think, though. Yes, the native X-Plane runs faster than the rosetta one on my Mac mini, but that is due to no plugins and crap running, because crap doesn’t come in universal2 yet. The frame gain is due to not having plugins slow things down, not due to the lack of Rosetta2. Which actually just shows how damn impressive Rosetta2 and the M1 chip really is.

It’s been out since we posted the blog post. Set the app to public beta in Steam.