Normally the “a” patch of Blender arrives much closer to the number release – about a month or so.

Five months after 2.79, however, the Blender Foundation has released 2.79a. It seemed likely that it would happen at some point, because it looks like they are aiming for 2.80 to be the next full release, and that will take some time. I haven’t had a chance to use 2.79a yet, but the release notes are mostly bug fixes and performance improvements.

Glancing through the release notes, one noteworthy edition is that Blender 2.79a now includes the CUDA 9 SDK in its build process, and it includes work-arounds for “performance loss” with those devices. While I haven’t heard any complaints from Titan V owners, the lack of CUDA 8 SDK was a big problem for early owners of GeForce GTX 10X0 cards, so Volta users might have been suffering in silence until now. If you were having issues with the Titan V, then you should try 2.79a.

If you’re interested, be sure to check out the latest release. As always, it’s free.