I wanted to take a moment to specifically point out a few other graphics enhancements in 2012.

1. Model Section View Caps

Now when you create a section view, you can choose to retain the section cap color AFTER you've committed the section view.  Just check "Keep cap color" and when you hit OK in the section view property manager, the section cap color will remain as it was shown while editing the section view.  In previous releases of SolidWorks, if you chose to keep the section cap, the cap would always revert to the model color.  See attached 2012_KeepCapColor.png.

2. Zebra Stripes

Zebra stripe functionality has been enhanced in a few ways. 

1. The spherical zebra stripe environment has been improved to remove polar discontinuities which previously made visual analysis difficult.
2. You can now browse for an image to be used as a zebra strip pattern.  You can find a few useful ones in "...sldworks.exe\data\Images\zebraanalysis"
3. The old cubemap style zebra stripe environment has been discontinued.

See attached Zebra.png

3. Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion (AO) is now a system wide setting.  Meaning that it can be enabled at any time, for any scene.  Previously, AO was only available by choosing one specific scene.  In addition, there is a new "draft quality" version of AO.  Draft quality AO is an approximation that may not always be as accurate, but will be faster to compute and will stay on (although at a reduced level of quality) while you manipulate the view.  See the attached video (2012_AO.mp4) showing AO as a system option available in the View, Display menu as well as on the HUD toolbar.  Also shown is the option to use Draft quality in Tools, System Options, Display/Selection.  Whether you use the default AO method or the new draft quality may depend on a number of factors such as the speed at which default AO is generated on your hardware setup and/or the specific model you have.