Artisan

• Faster skin weights painting in backface culling mode.
• Faster 3D painting on large NURBS surfaces.

Display and User Interface Components

• Faster texture load for heavy scenes with a lot of textures. Formats optimized are .bmp, .jpg, .png, .tga.

Rendering

• Significant performance improvement for scenes using global illumination with the mia_material_x_passes shader.

Constraints

• Faster constraint evaluation for the point, parent, and orient constraints based on optimized weight-checking.

Deformers

• Non-linear deformers are now multi-threaded.

Solvers

• Faster nParticle meshing.

Modeling

• Faster sculpting with Artisan for high polygon models.

General

• Improvements to file input/output performance.
• New environment variable MAYA_NO_PARALLEL_MEMCPY that allows you to disable parallel memory copy. This may improve speed for some systems.