Spectre & Meltdown – An Update From The EVE Dev Team!

As many of you will be aware, hardware vulnerabilities have been discovered in many brands and types of CPUs that were manufactured in the last 20 years, affecting computers across the globe.

Here at CCP, we are in the process of patching and performance testing our infrastructure with the aim of making the impact on game performance and player experience as minimal as possible, so that you guys can continue to enjoy blowing up each other’s internet spaceships.

Security patches for macOS, Window 7/8/10 and Linux are all in the process being rolled out from their operating system vendors (from Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux community) to address the issue. Both latest macOS and Windows 10 have already received updates that resolve the issue, and Windows 7 and 8 will receive updates tomorrow (2018/01/08). For many of our pilots, your systems will have either already received an update, if you’re running Windows 10 or latest macOS, or will be due to receive one tomorrow.

Please Note:

There have been reports of increased CPU usage for machines that are running the new update, ranging from a 5% to a 30% increase in CPU load, so we recommend that you keep an eye on your system’s performance.

Since EVE Online primarily uses your system’s graphics card for most of its workload, we anticipate that the performance impact on the EVE Online client will be minimal, however if you do notice any performance impact, or strange client behavior, feel free to let us know.

You can discuss this news item and give feedback, or let us know about issues in this thread on the EVE Online forums.