> But it does, and I guess the devs have their reasons, or
> maybe it's just old leftover code.

Check out this other post about it:

http://geheim.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13141&view=next&sid=41ba63d8dcc1ad464905c435d109c552

There could be some situations like with displacement maps or something like render-time subdivision where you would expect for the renderer to make vertex normals because it is making geometry in those situations.

But when it is not making new geometry, that's when it should use the vertex normals that were included along with the existing geometry that is being rendered.

Probably what happened was to support something kinds of stuff like displacement maps, they added some code to generate all vertex normals but without skipping over things that did not need (and actually are degraded from) having new normals calculated.


> Have you tried my 2.5 build?

Just tried it now - it looks like it is working fine.


- Michael