I've been messing around with the PBR renderer, trying some multi-bounce photon-mapped renders, mostly with success. I did a test of interior illumination with an area light outside the window, attached below. The global photon map included 100,000 photons and 10 bounces. I'm not using a caustic map. The result is pretty nice, but the chrome sphere has some strangeness.

Rendering a closeup, it looks like the renderer is using only the photon map for the direct lighting on the surfaces being reflected. For diffuse reflections that's what you want, but for pure specular reflections, shouldn't it still be doing the full direct lighting calculation? Is there a setting for this that I am missing?

Thanks

You're right - it should be running at least one diffuse bounce before it uses the secondary GI cache file. This has been fixed in the next build of 9.0.

Andrew