New Shadows
There is a new shadow system that calculates additional shadows which has a huge impact on the looks and feel of your maps. Also this feature comes at almost no performance cost.
Please note: there are a few shaders and objects (some rocks and grass I noticed so far) that do not work well with the new shadows. You can turn off the new shadows in the graphics menu if you want to go back to the original state.
LOD System (Level of Detail)
The game will soon feature an automatic LOD system and this patch has a trial version of it implemented. The LOD system renders objects differently depending on the distance/size they take on the screen. Objects that are very small or far away will be reduced in the quality of the meshes which can up to quadruple your FPS. You can now turn on the LOD system in the graphics menu. I recommend only doing so if your GPU is your bottleneck. If your CPU is your bottleneck you might see a downgrade in FPS even.
Please note: This feature is still work in progress and there will be changes and improvements to it soon.