Many features have been added to make fur and grass rendering for Peach possible. Big improvements were made in visual quality, rendering speed and memory usage.

The new Image Browser is blazingly fast and stable, and not only allows to browse for images in your filesystem, but can also show previews of materials, textures, world, lamp and image data.

Reflections and refractions are now possible to be rendered with a glossiness factor, controlling the roughness of material.

Great tools for making UV textures: you now can bake normal maps based on rendering a higher resolution mesh, you can bake displacement (including 32 bits depth), and you can bake transparency.

The softbody, cloth and particle physics now use a unified system for caching and baking. For real-time tweaking, a new option "Continue Physics" will continue the simulation regardless of the current frame.

Armatures now support Bone groups, custom Bone colors, automatic colors, more custom shape options, ... and many more goodies for our rigging department.

Many new tools and improvements have been made to speed up the rigging and posing workflow. There are now tools for more intuitive bone creation, various hotkeys to speedy batch-editing of bones,  auto-ik and auto-keyframing tweaks, and many more goodies.

Bone Heat Weighting is a new method to create vertex weights for bone deformation, it generates better results, and does not require setting a radius for bones. Also added was Quaternion-Interpolated Deformation for superior blends.

The Blender GameEngine has seen a great deal of improvement with an increase in play-back speed, a number of nice new features including 2D filter compositing, and of course attention to quality through bug fixes.

Raytraced soft shadows are now possible for all lamp types; including spot, sun and point lights.

FSA gives superior anti-aliasing for high dynamic range and compositing. Zmasks allow rendering of composite masks. Instancing gives efficient memory re-use for duplicates.

• Cubic shading (to prevent discontinuity banding)
• Higher level texture coordinates for duplicates (like feathers)
• Lamp fall-off curves
• Softer Halos, premul alpha, multisample shadowbuffers, ...

There have been a large number of script additions and script updates, as well as API improvements since the last release.