It's close enough to in-flight that it really doesn't matter. You shouldn't have to change the gamma on-the-fly anyways.
If it's only effects we're allowed to pipe up about then here are the stuff I want.
1) 3Dc support. It might be ATi-only right now, but I'll bet that DirectX is going to pick this one up. This way, we'll have texture compression with less blocks (the biggest problem with DXT5).
But more importantly, we can have normal maps (that don't take up too much space) that can be used increase the details in models without actually having to have more complex models.
2) Shaders support. Skip 1.x and go directly to 2.0. 3.0 support is easy to implement once 2.0 is in place so that's still good. With this, we'll have some really nice effects; environment mapping and fake reflections will be cheaper to do. We may be able to do better fake transparencies as well. And glowpoints re-done using shaders should look way better. In fact all the glows would look cooler if re-done properly with shaders.
If we get 3.0 support we'll get the cool object instanciation and displacement mapping. Object instanciation means we can have Homeworld numbers of fighters without as much slowdown. Displacement mapping is a suped-up version of bump-mapping that doesn't suck (i.e. we can look at it from a low-angle and it'll still appear to be a bump).
3) High dynamic range lighting. Want to know why renders can look like real-life, but in-game engines never looks quite as good? This is one reason why. Once HDR lighting is used, we'll start seeing really nice graphics. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the current hardware supports this yet. I'm fairly sure that it's either in the current new generation (r420, nv40) or in the next generation (nv50, r500) only.
3Dc should be possible. Shaders is a dream most likely. HDR is out of the question until quite a bit later.
