Only for single player - apparently a lot of turn processing time was spent zipping and unzipping the savefiles. (Yes, those 100MB combat replays are compressed! 8O)
Change "Compress Savegames" in your Settings.txt to FALSE, and the savefiles will be much larger than before, but they will (supposedly - I haven't personally tried it) save and load quicker too. However as noted in the changelog this will prevent you from loading compressed (normal) savefiles, so you'll have to toggle the setting if you want to play multiplayer
