Thanks to the AMAZING Firestorm and OPENSIM NGC team (and a bit of work from us!) our whole grid is now running with PBR textures and terrains. IN fact this image doesn't use PBR materials, just the standard texturing. Wow.
I don't mean to offend you... nothing in life is really optional... we're just finishing up how things are going, not just in SL but also in OPenSim... LL isn't currently showing any signs that the rendering will be improved in relation to PBR... If you want to give double the performance for 5% of the result, well, then that's just how it is... But what I don't like is downplaying something.
As long as you give the option to use the non-PBR viewer in the grid... nobody will stop you from experimenting with the PBR... I also hope that the whole thing will get better... but when I read that the next projects are already underway at LL... it could take a very long time. i guess
Oh yes I agree. We ofcourse are backward compatible on our grid as far as we can but always looking to the future, we have features like speech to text and text to speech, in world streaming and much more :-)