Final Fantasy maker and tech-demo master Square Enix unveiled a doozie of a demo at Microsoft's 2015 Build conference. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry], the demo showcased a range of DirectX 12 technical and processing wizardries to create a real-time animation on par with pre-rendered cut scenes and movies.

Update: We now have some delicious full-resolution screenshots of the demo, which you can check out at the end of the post.

During the demo (which you can view below), Microsoft's Steve Guggenheimer explained each scene contained around 63 million polygons, which is supposedly up to 12-times more than Square Enix managed to render in its Agni’s Philosophy DirectX 11 demo back in 2012. Running 63 million polygons with high-resolution textures—8K by 8K in this case—is no small feat. By comparison, Star Citizen's biggest carrier ships run up to around seven million polygons, while Ryse's protagonist Marius was made up of 85K polygons on the Xbox One.

One of the most impressive moments in the demo is when Guggenheimer zooms in to the character model, revealing an immense amount of detail right up to the individual pores on her skin. The character's hair was also revealed to be made up of individual polygons rendered with over 50 shaders and not the less expensive surface mapping technique that's commonly used to create features such as hair.

Unfortunately, for those hoping such visuals will be making their way to a DirectX 12 game any time soon, the demo ran on an absolute monster of a machine containing no less than four Nvidia GTX Titan X 12GB GPUs, along with an 8-core Intel Haswell-E CPU. The cost of the GPUs alone would total over $4,000. Square Enix's earlier Agni's Philosophy demo ran on a GTX 680 (how many of them isn't clear), along with an i7-3770K and 32GB of RAM.

Given the Agni's Philosophy demo landed three years ago and we still haven't seen a game that quite pulls off that level of visual grandeur (although Final Fantasy XV certainly comes close), and that condensing the power of four Titan X GPUs down to something more affordable is a few GPU generations away yet, it's doubtful that even once developers get to grips with DirectX 12's more efficient APIs the average game will look like Witch Chapter 0 [cry]. That's not to mention all the added overhead that physics and gameplay systems would add to a final game. Still, it's nice to dream, eh?