Thanks to further cleaning of render code - especially removing globals - the render core now can make use of two separate threads, speeding up rendering with almost a factor two for dual CPU systems.
The current implementation feeds each thread its own scanline to render. Only halo (and particle) rendering are not threaded yet, this because it is still a post process in the old render engine. For Unified Render this is threaded however.
Enable threaded render with a new button in the "Output" Panel in the Scene context buttons (F10).
All colors in the Blender renderer now only use 32 bits floating point values, rendering to a buffer of 4x32 bits RGBA. Only after creating such a buffer, the colors are converted to 4x8 bits RGBA.
In the Scene Context, render buttons, you can find two new options for it;
FBuf
Keep the 4x32 bits float buffer at end of rendering.
Post Process
Menu with options for brightness, contrast, gamma, hue and saturation. When an FBuf was rendered, the displayed 4x8 bits image gets updated according to these values after closing the menu.
For the next release input/output of high definition colors will be added, using ILM's OpenEXR.
Since Blender 1.0, the "Ortho" Camera actually faked an orthographic render by narrowing the view angle (e.g. lens value times 100) and moving back the camera with an identical factor. Although pictures rendered appeared to look "orthographic", it still had a slight perspective distortion and had - because it's a hack - a couple of other downsides too.
Setting a Camera on "Ortho" now renders true orthographic pictures. Because of this new feature, older (ortho rendering) Blender files might need to be tweaked to match desired results. A full backwards compatible conversion could not be implemented.