It's not exactly a secret that apart from boosting popularity of Blender the point of doing open movies is actually improving Blender. During work on the last released open movie, Sintel, internal Blender's raytracer got major speed-ups.

As Ton Roosendaal has just twitted, these changes finally landed today in main development branch of Blender and thus can be expected in the next version. Speaking of numbers, the reported performance boost is up to 50% on complex projects.

More on this topic:

• Interview with Thomas Krijnen on IfcOpenShell, Blender and architecture
• Interview with Sintel's art director David Revoy
• 3Delight exporter for Blender updated to feature new global illumination method
• Customized MyPaint gains animation for a new open movie project
• Recast & Detour project getting ready for Blender 2.60