[2023] Visual upgrades across New Eden

Capsuleers,

Today marks the roll out of new visual upgrades that enhance the beauty of EVE Online. Now you’ll witness unlimited shadows throughout New Eden. Where shadows used to be limited to 16 in busy scenes - now there are no restrictions, and they’ll look much clearer and sharper. You expect a shadow? You’ll see a shadow.

How the client implements the graphical settings for shadows has also been reworked. Shadows will now always be rendered at all settings other than ‘disabled’, with the filtering of shadows being adjusted to allow a balance between quality and performance. Your entire visual experience will now also be much smoother thanks to new anti-aliasing techniques that smooth edges and improve textures for ships, stations and the landscape across New Eden. It also puts an end to "specular aliasing" which manifests itself as shimmering pixels, so you’ll now be able to appreciate the contours and textures of your spectacular ship in all its glory when flying around in space. The new anti-aliasing implementation moves us away from an older method which included MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing) to a pure TAA (Temporal Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing) approach.

Due to an entire rewrite of how anti-aliasing is calculated and with several optimizations, performance is around the same as before, even with this better image quality. However, due to the change in how anti-aliasing is generated, it does come with a small caveat: low / medium AA is no longer available when using low / medium shader settings. This is currently a technical limitation due to how the game is rendered at the moment but will be revisited at a later date.

As part of the EVE Evolved initiative, the commitment to enhancing your gameplay means sharper, smoother, and more visually stunning updates that bring New Eden to life.

FIREWORKS IN MAY

And don't miss the anniversary festivities in May, including the extended Capsuleer Day event with exclusive and unique rewards, a chance to etch your name in history on and lighting up the sky at the firework bonanza at Jita 4-4 on 6 May. Plus, share your memories with fellow pilots using #eveonline20 on social media.