I've never heard that before. Do you maybe have a source for that? The Visual Studio compiler is way too slow for that to work on a big code base, so I highly doubt that this is true.

To clarify, cmake doesn't directly invoke the compiler. It generates a makefile that will ask gcc to generate make-dependencies when it's compiling (the first clean build doesn't need dependency info as everything is rebuilt anyway so this works). These dependencies are then included in the makefiles in subsequent runs. Cmake itself doesn't need to know about them.

When using cmake to generate VS projects it probably does something equivalent, unless msbuild has dependency tracking built in out of the box, I don't know msbuild very well.