R version 3.1.2 is a maintenance release and should not pose any major changes for normal use, but the changelog is worth looking at.
All externally requested packages as by this release (VarianceGamma, fBasics, rgdal, and rgeos) have been built into the new package. R at the department is still built with GCC, but now has added png and X11 support, and is already set as the default R. If you need to run the previous version, this can be achieved by calling it explicitly via:
module load R/3.1.1-gcc
Please let us know of any problems you encounter with this release.