Blender 2.78c release now available

The latest update to Blender 2.78 is out! Get it now to boost your Cycles rendering performance and get rock-solid stability. Here is the massive update list!

• Multithreaded shader compilation and optimizations for emission meshes
  
• More efficient noise reduction for Branched Path Tracing
  
• Unused shader nodes are now ignored on render time
  
• Improvements to procedural textures
  
• Fireflies reduction for background textures when using MIS
  
• Different seed for subframes and different stereo views, allowing "slow-motion" effect and improved VR experience
  
• Distance culling for objects to remove objects which are too far away from the camera
  
• Better remaining time estimation
  
• Various optimizations and fixes for deformation motion blur
  
• Added time steps BVH option to speed up rendering of scenes with motion blur
  
• Hair particle settings were moved to Geometry panel of Render context
  
• Beckmann/GGX distribution with 0 roughness is now considered a singular ray
  

• Use XDG folder for cache on Linux and OSX, which avoids having per-Blender version folder with all the OpenCL/CUDA kernels built.
  
• Ability to enable/disable individual GPUs as opposite to old behaviour with pre-defined combinations only. Not only this helps to some artists, but also makes it possible to have flexible benchmark scripting.
  

• Use more global SSE optimizations for SSE4.1+ kernels.
  
• Multiple improvements for the latest AVX2 CPUS:
  
• Optimized various math utilities (cross-products, dot-products, min-axis-selection and others).
  
• Faster version of triangle intersection function.
  
• Optimization of various steps in BVH traversal algorithm (including both construction and traversal).
  

• Added 3D textures support for OpenCL
  
• Major render time improvements on transparent shadows
  

• Optimization of dependency graph construction time
  
• Fix missing or wrong relation links, which were causing hard-to-reproduce bone flickering in complex rigs
  
• Fix various crashes related on linked data blocks
  
• Fixes for missing animation updates
  

• Fixed regression crash when adding texture node to compositor
  
• Fixed crash of inverse kinematics on 32 bit Windows platforms
  
• Improve multi-threaded usage of fluid simulation
  
• Return correct alpha for environment map in GLSL
  

Check out how the massive motion blur render time improvements were made possible in the latest film project at the Blender Institute

For more detailed release docs, check out the wiki