EVE drops support for Pentium 3, Athlon XP and "older CPUs"

CCP said today that computers running an array of older CPUs will be dropped from playing EVE Online tomorrow.

"CPUs that don't support the SSE2 instruction set will not be able to run EVE Online after the Incursion 1.1.0 deployment on Tuesday, January 18, 2011," said the Icelandic developer on the game's blog.

"This will cause players still using Intel Pentium 3 or older and AMD Athlon XP or older CPUs to not be able to run the EVE Online client. Athlon 64 CPUs are not affected."

During the testing of the game's next content update, the company found that older CPUs were crashing with the client thanks to "the SSE2 instruction set".

We're not quite sure what that it, but CCP, upon looking at the game's stats and seeing that only 0.3 percent of those playing would be affected, decided to drop support for older CPUs.

"We've looked at hardware trend reports and the general status of the market and this obsolete generation of CPUs in desktop computers and gaming rigs is nearly extinct," said the firm.

"We have, therefore, decided to not let this block the deployment of Incursion 1.1.0."

Goodnight, sweet silicon princes. Hit the link for the full deal.