Shader Model 5.0 introduces several new features for vertex, hull, domain, geometry, and pixel shaders, including uniform indexing of resources, SV_Coverage system value, and double precision support. Compute shaders also gain features like raw and structured buffer views, atomic operations, and thread local storage. Compute shaders are well-suited for general purpose GPU tasks like post-processing and can perform Gaussian blur more efficiently than pixel shaders by reducing memory bandwidth usage through thread local storage.