May 15, 2026
An early look at the upcoming release of Earth Volumetric Studio, anticipated in the next one to three months pending full internal QA. This is a significant update: it continues the move toward GPU-accelerated geostatistics, delivers a ground-up rewrite of the kriging system and variography fitting, and retires the last of the legacy field file support. One change may require action before you upgrade, so please read carefully.
EVS Is Moving to CUDA: NVIDIA Hardware Is Increasingly Important
The most recent release of EVS converted the distance to surface module to use CUDA for GPU acceleration. The new implementation requires an NVIDIA graphics card, and on supported hardware it performs dramatically better than the previous CPU and GPU-based implementations.
This is the beginning of a broader shift. Future releases of EVS will leverage CUDA for an expanding set of computational modules. If your current workstation does not have an NVIDIA graphics card, we strongly encourage you to begin planning a hardware refresh so you can take full advantage of upcoming performance improvements.
Hardware RequirementsKriging and Variography Have Been Rewritten
The kriging engine in EVS has been rewritten from the ground up and now takes full advantage of CUDA on supported NVIDIA hardware. Real-world projects we have benchmarked range from roughly 2x faster on smaller datasets to over 100x faster on the larger, more demanding models where kriging runtime has historically been the bottleneck. The faster your card, the larger the gain.
The variography module has also been updated. In addition to performance improvements, the new variogram fitting routines produce significantly better fits on many real-world datasets, especially noisy environmental data where automatic fits previously required manual adjustment. The net effect is faster iteration, less hand-tuning, and more defensible models for regulators and litigation.
For users running large geostatistical workflows on a regular basis, this release alone is likely to justify a hardware upgrade if you are not already on a modern NVIDIA card.
Action Required: Legacy Field Support Is Being Dropped
If you have historical project archives that still contain .inp or .fld data (old site characterizations, archived deliverables, expert-witness materials, or anything else you may need to revisit), we strongly recommend reviewing your archives now and converting those files with your current version of EVS before upgrading. Once you move to the next release, the conversion path will no longer be available in the product.
That said, for most projects we recommend recreating the data in the new release rather than simply converting a legacy file created in an old release. The rewritten kriging and updated variogram fitting will, in most cases, produce better models than the originals. The main reason to retain old converted models is to preserve them for direct comparison against historic deliverables and prior results.
If you discover legacy files after upgrading and need assistance, please contact us. Once support is removed, the only option we may be able to offer is a link to the 2026.3.5 installer so you can perform the conversion yourself; handling it ahead of time will be substantially easier.
Contact Support