Rendering out procedural normals, how to?

Say I want to use Blender/Cycles nodes for procedural generation of 2D texture maps. Perturbing normals using basically anything, then I want to save those out.

Saving out what is rendered, I can plug texture in directly to normal socket and it appears to work (but I’m guessing only on a similar plane as generated it in the first place).

What do I need to do to render it out in a color format that normal mapping node understands? How do I treat color space in order to obtain correct output (none on everything to make it useable with non-color data?).

I would prefer normal maps over bumps as bump maps looks absolutely horrible even at 8k outputs (8bit, probably can’t afford to use 16-bit anyway).

http://digicreatures.net/articles/cycles-normal-baking.html

Or without gamma transformations:

Thanks. That definitely seems to work. And I have to say, was a tad more complicated than I anticipated.