Epic Games gave developers their first taste of the new Unreal Engine earlier this week with a hefty Early Access offer. The engine's new "Nanite" feature boasts support for "basically infinite" detail, and one indie company decided to test it out with a bunch of good kids to see how far it could go.

"Nanite" effectively allows developers to import incredibly high-detail models (such as high-resolution photogrammetric captures) with minimal performance impact. To test it, Taylor Loper, lead developer at Ionized Games, quickly scanned his dog Ziggy, who was snoozing in bed, threw him into the editor, and replicated him 1,00 times.

The result was a dog of 10 billion polygons, arguably the best Unreal project ever.

True to Epic's word, Unreal hardly broke a sweat rendering so many dogs. In a follow-up tweet, Loper wrote: "I'm sure you'll see some amazing enhancements with the 10 series and up cards. I'll run it on a gtx 750 when I get a chance, but it will work."

Indeed, one of the concerns with UE5 is that the ultra-realistic scans will further bloat the storage requirements of the game; Loper told one commenter that there is no reason why an Unreal title should be inherently larger than a game made with another engine.

"This model is 1.5 Gb and the sample project Epic released is ~100 Gb. The game will certainly get bigger, but that is still primarily the developer's responsibility. If I had spent another 10 minutes, I could have brought this model down to 50-100 Mb.

Now that Unreal Engine 5 has proven that it can handle infinitely detailed canines, there is only one question left to ask: What is the best way to make the game more realistic, and what is the best way to make it more realistic? (An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs) by Xalavier Nelson Jr (a former PC Gamer contributor), when can we expect a distressingly photorealistic sequel?