Reminder that Neptune is hardforking at block height 15.000. Users must upgrade to version 0.5.0 before block height 15.000.
The hardfork changes the preprocessing step of the guessing algorithm, so miners who built custom mining software need to update their algorithms. The guessing loop does not change, provided that you have the 42GB RAM that the memory-hard guessing requires.
The change in the algorithm has the benefit that it becomes free to switch between different block proposals that share the same parent. We believe this change will be good for confirmation times and transaction throughput.
More info can be found in the pull request: fork!: Change PoW algorithm to make proposal-switching free by Sword-Smith · Pull Request #727 · Neptune-Crypto/neptune-core · GitHub