Are there benefits to the switch to a Gen 12 renderer that aren't performance related? Does the quality of the render improve? Are there better visuals all around, or is this strictly just performance?

Gen 12 is strictly just performance, but of course, Ali also mentioned that in previous talks, it gives us more room for more fancy stuff, and we can use all the new fancy features in Vulkan, like ray tracing and what else there is. So not just performance.