This is a creased displaced catmull-clark subdivision surface.

Increasing the micropolygon length is equivalent to making the object's size smaller in the image.

• When the object is large, it is finely tesselated into milions of micropolygons.
• When the object becomes smaller than a pixel, only the control mesh remains.

This works a bit like an automatic level of detail and preserves memory when an object is so small in screen that it doesn't need an fully detailed representation.

This is what we call Data Amplification, when a compact geometric representation can be augmented to create more detail on demand.