by EVE Online Team11:00am on Wednesday 1st April 2026
The vision of EVE Forever means that CCP Games is committed to keeping EVE Online at the forefront of today's modern graphical development techniques and technology. As part of that development, we’re excited to announce three new opt-in graphical features in the next major update.
First, expanding on the DLSS option added in August 2025, the next evolution, available for those with AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and macOS graphics cards, is CLSS.
Short for Capsuleer Layered Spaceship Substitutor, CLSS is a new graphics process designed to enhance hull presentation of your ships by improving material response, surface clarity, and overall visual brilliance across supported ships. The result is a cleaner, richer, and noticeably more fabulous look in space, helping you to SLAY.
During internal development, the feature also produced an unexpected side effect. In some cases, CLSS can increase the perceived awesomeness of the ship it is applied to and then also to nearby ships when a secondary toggle is enabled. We also took the opportunity, while developing the feature, to implement a much-requested community feature utilizing the same technology but with a larger emphasis on performance: going one step further and offering an ultra-lightweight client option. This feature, known as Performance Optimized Textures And Temporal Occlusion, will disable all lighting-based graphical effects and replace all ship models with a single unifying design.
CLSS was developed as part of ongoing work to further refine ship visuals in EVE Online. The system adds an additional hull enhancement pass, giving them a much-needed glow-up across a wide range of lighting conditions. For those fitting high meta level modules onto the ship, more commonly known in the community as “Blinging out” a ship, the model is further enhanced for the local user, reflecting their owner's opulence.
For players using supported settings, CLSS will be available as a toggleable option with three modes:
Standard CLSS
Enhanced CLSS
POTATO mode
When Enhanced CLSS is enabled, nearby ships may inherit a portion of the visual effect, resulting in heightened glamour, stronger silhouette presence, and a measurable increase in cinematic excellence across local space.
The first wave of CLSS-compatible ships includes several hulls that have shown promising results in internal testing:
Bling fit Nestor:
Enhanced CLSS Mode:
“CLSS began as a straightforward visual enhancement pass, but once we saw what it was doing to certain hulls, we knew we were dealing with something much more powerful,” said a member of EVE Online’s graphical team. “We started out prototyping character portraits, seen here with the avatar of capsuleer Slippy Mcgee, which really enhanced all aspects of their character portrait, but we realized we needed to think bigger and pivoted to the in-space experience.”
“There’s still work to do, especially around Performance Optimized Textures And Temporal Occlusion mode behavior on nearby objects, where we hope to be able to expand the feature to stations and structures, but the early results are extremely encouraging.”
Coming to New Eden
The rollout of CLSS will begin with limited support while further tuning is completed. As with all new visual features, player feedback will help inform future development.
Capsuleers are encouraged to test the feature responsibly. This update also lays the foundation for our upcoming avatar gameplay-focused expansion, internally referred to as Mogging in Stations!
See you at Fanfest!