You may not know it but as the next generation of consoles really gets rolling, middleware companies like Graphine Software and their products like Granite SDK are becoming all the more visible. Granite helps in compressing HD textures while still maintaining strong details, which will become all the more useful in PS4 and Xbox One game development.

It’s application with DirectX 11.2+ could give it an edge on the Xbox One and PC though. GamingBolt spoke to Graphine CEO Aljosha Demeulemeester to find out what Granite could potentially offer when used together with the API.

“The Granite SDK supports both software and hardware virtual texturing. The latter is also called ‘Tiled Resources’ in DX 11.2 or Partially Resident Textures in OpenGL. The benefit with hardware virtual texturing is that the hardware now takes care of filtering across tile borders as well as fetching the correct pixel from the cache.

“This makes the shaders less complex and faster to execute. Another big advantage is that you don’t need to add pixel borders to your tiles so that the memory usage can be reduced. The Granite SDK will automatically switch to hardware virtual texturing if it is available on your system, or it will fall back to software virtual texturing if it’s not.”

It’s interesting to note that DirectX 12, at the moment, sounds very similar to AMD’s own low level API, Mantle, and as such the differences are not very clear at the moment. Since DirectX 12 will allow coding which will be more closer to the metal, it will no doubt have a positive advantage when used with Graphine’s Granite SDK. The SDK has been used in Dragon Commander which bought a reduction of texture memory by 82% on the GPU side, and since DX12 will allow for a more direct access compared to the previous iterations, it will be interesting to see how Granite will evolve when DirectX 12 launches late next year.

Update: We were able to get more on clarification about DirectX 12’s integration with Granite SDK. You can check it out here.

What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

Kennedy stated, “There’s little difference really. TrueSky works very well for both, and most of the underlying code is the same. The real difference is between this generation and the last, and that’s reflected in the level of demand we’re seeing for TrueSky now.”

With more games taking advantage of DirectX 11/11.1 in the coming years, how will they be able to take advantage of Simul’s programs in comparison to current-gen games? Kennedy responded that, “One area with huge potential is volumetric rendering. In the DX9 era we were able to effectively simulate raytracing for volumetric clouds, and got great results. But the shaders were too limited to do some of the more advanced volumetric effects we wanted.

“Now those restrictions are removed, we’re able to really go to down – our new crepuscular rays was not feasible on DX9, but on DX11 it’s not only possible, but super-fast.”

Stay tuned for our full interview with Roderick Kennedy next week.