Ubisoft Shows Off Micropolygon Rendering In Anvil Engine

Nanite has revolutionized how artists and developers work in Unreal Engine 5, making it possible to create huge, detailed environments without the usual polygon restrictions. Ubisoft took a similar approach with Micropolygon, its proprietary virtualized geometry solution for the Anvil engine, which debuted in Assassin's Creed Shadows.

According to Ubisoft, Micropolygon allows Anvil to "render millions of tiny geometric details at once", streaming dense assets through its virtual geometry pipeline without the need for manually created LODs. At last week's GDC, Lionel Berenguier and Jack Minnetian gave an in-depth look at the Micropolygon rendering pipeline, discussing the practical challenges they faced and the solutions developed while implementing it for a massive open-world game. Their talk focused in particular on rasterization improvements, extensions to the deferred material system, and the GPU-driven streaming architecture.

The demo above uses NVIDIA's Zorah tech demo assets to show just how much geometric complexity Ubisoft's technology can handle. At the moment, the talk isn't available online, and so far, only snippets have appeared on social media.

You can find more on the Micropolygon Rendering in Anvil lecture here. Meanwhile, if you're curious about virtual geometry systems, Brian Karis' SIGGRAPH 2021 presentation is definitely worth checking out:

You can find more on the Micropolygon Rendering in Anvil lecture here. And if you want a closer look at Zorah, we've put together an article showcasing the incredible work of the art team behind the demo.

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