Hello capsuleers! CCP Zorba here on behalf of Team RnB. We want to talk to you about DirectX 11.

If you've played EVE Online using Singularity, our public testing server, you may be running with DirectX 11. The change should be mostly unnoticeable, as our goal right now is to have a DX11 client that performs the same (performance, stability) as our DX9 client. This change will go out to everyone in our winter expansion, EVE Online: Rubicon.

DX11 is enabled by default if your GPU and OS support it. If either does not, you will use the DX9 client automatically.

A few frequently asked questions:

• Can I choose between DX9 and DX11? The Launcher will soon have a setting where you can toggle this (if your GPU does not support DX11, this checkbox will be disabled or missing).
• Are you sunsetting DX9? No, and we have no plan to.
• Does this affect the Mac? No, Mac will continue to use DX9.
• Do I have to download two clients now? No, we just ship a DX9 and DX11 version of our rendering engine (Trinity) and choose between them at runtime.
• Is the minimum machine spec changing? No, the minimum spec machine does not support DX11 and will continue to use DX9.
• My client is using DX11 but looks the same, what gives? Our DX9 and DX11 clients should look the same. No new features. Yet.

Getting the DirectX 11 version of our engine (which has been a long time in the works) into your hands is a huge and important step so we can test and harden it thoroughly. We hope our next DX11 Dev Blog will tell you about some awesome new graphical features.

Finally, if you notice any graphics issues, please report them in the feedback thread here.

-Team RnB

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TL;DR: As of July 10, 2013, we’re changing the minimum and recommended system specifications for EVE Online and adding official Windows 8 support. On Windows, minimum system is now a AMD X2600 or NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GPU, and a dual core CPU @ 2.0 GHz. Recommended system is an AMD Radeon 6790 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 GPU, and a quad core CPU @ 2.0 GHz. The specifications are somewhat higher on the Mac.

In order to make EVE Online's second decade even more beautiful than its first, we need to update the minimum and recommended system specifications. You can check out the exact specs here, and read on for more information. We've completed extensive performance testing of the new specs to ensure a good user experience.

There are three important reasons for these changes:

• First, some of the old hardware is or will soon be unsupported. For example, as of the R310 driver update NVIDIA’s minimum supported hardware will be the GeForce 8 series. 
• Second, the old hardware is difficult to find. If we cannot find the hardware to test our game, we cannot guarantee a smooth player experience.
• Finally, EVE looks better than it did when we last updated these specifications, and some amount of that is due to more complex graphics. We cannot release more shiny and keep our performance the same in all cases. Note however that Windows min spec has changed relatively little; we make these graphical updates optional where possible.

And two specific call-outs:

• Mac users: Because the Mac's drivers are not well tuned, and our Mac client is not a native client, the minimum and recommend specs are beefier than Windows. As you Mac players know, this update has been a long time coming, and the game should run more reliably on the specified hardware.
• AMD users: For a long time, the minimum/recommended AMD cards were not matched to their NVIDIA counterparts. They are equivalent now.

Our numbers tell us these changes will affect a small number of people, and we'd also like to stress that you can still try and run the game with unsupported hardware, we just can't guarantee a good experience.

And in the spirit of not only saying goodbye to the old but also saying hello to the new, we're officially supporting Windows 8. If you play on Windows 8 and experience any client problems, we really want to know about them!

CCP Zorba, CCP Explorer, and CCP Vertex