New system requirements for EVE

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!

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