Just additional information. So normals input can do many things. There are 3 common ways of manipulating the normals. Height map, Bump map(Technically straight bumb), and Normal map. Blender uses Height and Normals or Bump node and Normal Map node. You can also use the uniformed Normal node. So, yes Blender needs to convert the texture based on the method(Node) selected. As for the Non-color, it doesn’t convert it to anything. It just provides the numbers as they are. The best way to think of it, is that it treats it as vectors XYZ instead of color RGB. That’s why most of the maps need to be set to Non-Color. So that their information doesn’t get manipulated(Processed)
