Graphine have released version 3 of their Granite 3 texture streaming technology. Available stand-alone or as a plugin for Unity and Unreal, Graphine enables you to use gigapixel level texture detail in your game or application.
This release brings the following new features:
Detailed Technical Features
- Greatly improved sparse data handling. Data no longer needs to be available at all resolution levels on all layers.
- Duplicate tile elimination. Duplicate tiles will be eliminated by the tools and only streamed once at run-time.
- Support grayscale texture formats (BC4, 8-bit).
- Large individual GPU caches up to 1GB. Cache sizes are no longer limited to the maximum texture size supported by the GPU.
- Caches are now build per datatype instead of per layer layout.
- More efficient cache memory use. Caches can now be shared between tiles sets with a different number of layers and layer datatypes.
- Significant speedups in Granite core both on the GPU and CPU side. Overall up to 50% CPU and 50% GPU speedup may be seen in the Granite “Tick” per frame update call.
- Tiling textures are now more efficiently handled reducing memory and bandwidth use.
- Fixed several cubemap mipmapping issues.
- New file format (version 3), Granite is backwards compatible with version 2.
- Improved GPU memory tracking & logging.
- Separate tool set installer for faster tool updates.
- Total texture import freedom: Combine single images, tiled images and UDIM images in one stacked texture.
- Many Tile Set Studio usability improvements.
- Support for importing custom mipmaps.
In other Granite news, released an updated plugin for Unreal 4.10.1:
So what’s new in Granite for Unreal 4.10.1?
- New GPU cache settings: one global setting with the option to specify the cache size per texture format. It’s easier to use and allows Granite to optimize memory usage even more.
- Sampling quality can now be set in every individual Granite sample node. This allows a better trade-off between quality and performance on a per-node basis.
- Large individual GPU caches up to 1GB.
- Import custom mipmaps.
- Separate tool set installer for faster tool updates.
- A number of bugfixes.
- All other benefits from using Granite SDK 3.0.