Contributed by Alfredo de Greef, the quality of image textures in Blender has been considerably improved. New image filtering options such as Elliptically Weighted Average (EWA) have been added, for crisper results with less artifacts such as moiré. This is mainly achieved by fixing the texture derivatives during the shading pipeline.

Morten Mikkelsen and Mario Kishalmi provided further improvements of bumpmapping in Blender, now making it totally behave scientifically correct.
kishalmi.servus.at/3D/bumpcode/

An initial version of deep shadow maps has been implemented, ready for further testing and development during the durian project. It currently supports: 

• Existing shadow buffer options: filter, soft, bias
• Multiple sample buffers, merged into one
• Compression with user defined threshold
• Non-textured alpha transparency, using Casting Alpha value
• Strand render

Not supported yet are:

• Tiling disk cache, so can use a lot of memory
• Per part rendering for lower memory usage during creation
• Colored shadows, or textured color/alpha mapped shadows
• Mipmaps for faster filtering
• Volume shadows