This is a major release with many exciting new features!
Beware of bugs.

The list below contains a subset of the changes introduced:

• We now offer 64-bit Windows and Mac OS X builds.
• Switch to MSVC 2010; no more assembly manifests.
• Cocoa port for better Mac OS X support, esp. newer versions.
• We now compile the Python modules into panda3d/*.pyd modules; no more imp.load_dynamic hackery needed.
• Support for GPU profiling in OpenGL, see pstats-gpu-timing
• sRGB framebuffers, see framebuffer-srgb
• sRGB texture support, see Texture::F_srgb et al.
• Integer vector support, including passing to shaders
• Native .ogg vorbis and .wav loader (does not require ffmpeg)
• FFmpeg support is a separate plug-in module now, libp3ffmpeg.
• Sample programs are now part of the source code repository
• Can be built with Python 3 (highly experimental)
• Improvements to Windows installer
• M_filled_wireframe rendering mode
• Support specifying sampler state separate from textures
• Support for bindless texture clearing
• Texture LOD bias and min/max LOD settings
• Framebuffer properties allows separate red/green/blue bits
• Explicit float color and float depth specification in fbprops
• Coverage samples settable via FrameBufferProperties
• Stereo buffer implementation in OpenGL via FBOs
• Support enumeration of pixel formats in WebcamVideo
• Frame rate meter can be configured to show milliseconds
• Changes to improve font crispness with default settings
• Fix assertion error when using more than one GraphicsEngine
• raw-w, raw-a, etc. keyboard events for layout-independent input
• Allow querying active keyboard layout via win.get_keyboard_map()
• Distinguish between lmeta and rmeta keys on Mac OS X
• Floating-point image manipulation API, support float tiffs
• Various new 16-bit and 32-bit and int texture formats
• Man pages are now available for the majority of utilities

Pipeline:

• Fix bugs with group transformations in .egg
• Don’t create unnecessary intermediate node when loading .egg
• bam2egg supports materials, and correctly converts animations
• dae2egg has some skeletal animation support
• Support Maya versions up to 2015

OpenGL renderer changes:

• Error checking is now OFF by default for performance reasons, set gl-check-errors or gl-debug to true to enable.
• GL 4.2 shader_image_load_store support (incl. multi-bind)
• Layered render-to-texture (using geometry shaders)
• Seamless cube maps (on by default), see gl-cube-map-seamless
• Added gl-debug for improved debug output support
• Added GL object labels when gl-debug is enabled
• gl-dump-compiled-shaders can be used to dump program binaries
• Direct3D-style NT_packed_dabc vertex arrays now directly supported
• Native rendering of line strips, using primitive restart
• Immutable texture storage support (disabled by default)
• Bindless texture support (disabled by default)
• Specular component is now computed separately in FFP

Shader system:

• Support for tessellation shaders
• Support for compute shaders via ComputeNode
• GLSL preprocessor with “#pragma include” support
• Much better coverage of shader inputs in GLSL
• GLSL error messages now show source filename
• Fixes apiclip_of_x shader inputs
• Matrices can be passed directly to setShaderInput
• Support binding images to shaders
• Viewport array support

Optimizations and performance improvements:

• Use of C++11 move semantics to reduce refcounting overhead
• Build with Eigen by default for faster linear math
• Dramatic overhead reduction of generated bindings
• Streamline culling process
• Tighter bounding volume generation
• Take advantage of CPU features for bit operations
• Circumvent bounding volume generation when not required
• Optimizations for interned strings
• Use of GCC atomics should improve 64-bit Linux performance

API features:

• Buffer protocol support for textures and arrays
• Interrogate supports various C++11 features
• Expose TextGlyph interfaces for making custom text renderers
• Better handling of default arguments for many functions
• Cyclic references can sometimes be tracked through tasks
• ShowBase clean teardown possible
• API documentation is more accurate
• Improve interfaces for interop with other applications

Deprecated features:

• Use of pandac.PandaModules is discouraged; use panda3d.core
• Deprecate DirectStart and global run() function; use ShowBase
• Remove old decal system
• Remove Direct3D 8 renderer
• Remove M_light_vector tex gen mode and FFP-based bump mapping

Bug fixes:

• Various point rendering issues are fixed now
• Fix pview issue with 1-frame and/or multiple animations
• Fixes for multisampling in FBOs
• Fix aspect ratio of frame rate meter
• Support NaN and infinity values in Config.prc variables
• Fixes for webcams on Linux that do not output Huffman tables
• Better support for non-basic Cg shaders on non-NVIDIA cards
• Many others