And that, in a nutshell, is the definition of a micro-polygon engine. The cost in terms of GPU resources is likely to be very high, but with next-gen, there's the horsepower to pull it off and the advantages are self-evident. Rendering one triangle per pixel essentially means that performance scales closely with resolution. "Interestingly, it does work very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well," adds Penwarden. "So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit and then we can adapt to that. In the demo we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time."
Penwarden also confirms that the temporal accumulation system seen in Unreal Engine 4 - which essentially adds detail from prior frames to increase resolution in the current one - is also used in UE5 and in this demo. The transparency here from Epic is impressive. We've spent a long time poring over a range of 3840x2160 uncompressed PNG screenshots supplied by the firm. They defy pixel-counting, with resolution as a metric pretty much as meaningless as it is for, say, a Blu-ray movie. But temporal accumulation does so much more for UE5 than just anti-aliasing or image reconstruction - it underpins the Lumen GI system.