Graphine’s texture streaming middleware Granite will be used in The Farm 51’s Get Even, it’s upcoming first person action game for PS4, Xbox One and PC. It will be used to render the game’s high resolution textures while maximizing efficiency.

Development director for The Farm 51 Wojciech Pazdur stated that, “Graphine’s texture streaming system, Granite, helps to solve the issues that accompany huge amounts of scanned data. With Graphine’s help, we’ll be able to create pixel perfect graphics in Get Even.”

Graphine CEO and co-founder Aljosha Demeulemeester further added that, “Photogrammetry, and 3D scanning in general, allows game developers to create high quality game assets that have the uniqueness and level of detail only found in the real world. Our Granite SDK is aimed at solving the technical problems you encounter when using these large amounts of texture data in a real-time 3D application. It’s a perfect match.”

Get Even will be out in 2015. Stay tuned for more information.

Microsoft recently revealed DirectX 12 for the PC and Xbox One, which promised a good number of improvements to the way we viewed games. While it won’t result in faster hardware, DX 12 will be capable of better efficiency and optimization, especially with middleware like Graphine’s Granite SDK.

We spoke to CEO Aljosha Demeulemeester about DirectX 11.2 and asked about the improvements that the API could provide. After talking about the potential of Granite when used with DirectX 11.2+, we clarified with Demeulemeester about the possible benefits with DX 12. He stated that, “DX12 continues to build on DX11.1+ and as such, also includes the Tiled Resources feature. DX12 is however closer to the metal and gives more control to the developer.

“This allows us to further optimize our tiling back end (for DX12) that takes care of loading texture tiles into video memory. Also, we get more access to how data is stored in video memory, which is very important for us. Specifically for our tiling back end, we expect a performance increase compared to DX11.1+ but we don’t have any hard numbers on this yet.”

DirectX 12 is still a ways off but is continuing to make waves for both good and bad reasons. What are your thoughts on the API? Let us know in the comments.

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.