Yes, there is a marked improvement in the processing of RAW files. Moving of the sliders is more responsive and you can see the results in less than 5 seconds. I'm using a 2-year old AMD Athlon 1800 with 512MB RAM, so if you're using a faster processor, you may have better yields. Saving of the processed RAW files also seems to be slightly faster though... But start up is still slooooww.