EVE Online is once again making sure it’s ready for the hardware future while alerting those who are still living in the hardware past. By Tuesday, January 11th, the game will no longer support DirectX 9 and will require all players to run the game in DirectX 11.
“Continuing to support DirectX 9 has become a significant development cost that is impacting our ability to improve the graphical fidelity of EVE Online. With less than 1% of players being limited to using DirectX 9, the time is right to end support in 2022,” notes CCP Games in the announcement.
Players capable of running EVE in DX11 are asked to go to the launcher’s Game Client setting and click off the box that runs the game with DX9. On Tuesday, November 30th, all existing players will move to the DX11 version if their GPU supports it, but players can still elect to use DX9 between then and January 11th. For those who do manually move to the older version, CCP is “strongly suggesting” those players reach out to customer support to identify the reason why. It’s also important to note that this affects PC players, as the Mac version utilizes Metal and not DirectX.
The change is ultimately being touted as a net positive for players as it will let the devs build “a better foundation to bring amazing visuals to all pilots in EVE.” So if you’re still behind the hardware curve and plan to keep playing in this space sandbox, you have roughly a month and a half to try to catch up.
