It's all hardware based, written at the same time as the Z buffer, with no pixel shader invocation required and it operates at the same resolution as the Z buffer. For the first time, objects and their coordinates in world-space can be tracked, even individual triangles can be identified. Modern GPUs don't have this access to the triangle count without a huge impact on performance.
"As a result of the ID buffer, you can now know where the edges of objects and triangles are and track them from frame to frame, because you can use the same ID from frame to frame," Cerny explains. "So it's a new tool to the developer toolbox that's pretty transformative in terms of the techniques it enables. And I'm going to explain two different techniques that use the buffer - one simpler that's geometry rendering and one more complex, the checkerboard."